I often talk about how Chiang Mai is the perfect location for Hashing because it is a big enough city that there are a lot of things to do here and a lot of people, but it is mostly surrounded by small cities or farms or even national parks and this means we have plenty of nature very nearby.
Other Hashes that I have been to would incorporate either a very long ride to the start point, or we would do an urban run, which is still fun but nowhere near as nice as doing something in the jungle or woods.
While most of the nearby land is cultivated to some degree, the farmers don't seem to mind that we are on their land. We never litter, we never break anything (unless it is by accident and then we pay for a new and better thing) and we also clean up any trash that we see while we are running. The few times we have been approached by farmers or country people about what we are doing on their land, they normally will laugh and on a few occasions the people wanted to join us to learn english and get some exercise. One of those people worked his way up to become the General Manager of our organization years later.
The main thing that makes Chiang Mai such a special place can be shown in this map of a recent run taken from the sky.
You can see here that we are quite close to civilization during the entirety of this run but at the same time we are in nature the entire time as well including going past two lakes. Water features are important in runs because there just aren't that many of them in the world. Sure, our water feature was a moss covered rather gross irrigation pond, but it's still water!
To the North East on this map you can see where we entered a national park for a KM or so and that was right at the start. Those are always the best parts but sometimes the park rangers have an attitude about us being there even though we never do any damage. In fact, we are doing their jobs for them when we clean up the trash along the way.
These are the perfect runs really, because if anything were to go awry, we are never very far away from a building where we could get some help. Bad things rarely happen in our group but they have happened and access to a road to evac someone is quite important in those situations . Knock on wood because nobody has been seriously injured on our runs but there was a heart attack scare once and the medics had to be called in.
This trail was a bit over our usual 5km and this is just fine in this sort of situation because everyone in our group that is a bit at risk brings a phone with them and if they want to bypass the rest of the trail the Hares, who stay at the start/finish point will drop a pin and the person in question can simply walk through the neighborhood back to the start point. We do care about safety because a lot of the members of our group aren't exactly Olympic athletes and they are in their "golden years." The idea at these isn't to train anyone for marathons, we are just trying to get out there and have some fun and a bit of exercise. That is why in the first pic you don't see anyone other than one person running. The rest of us start out almost every event by walking with the crew and having a chat. Then the runners will later break away from the pack.
There are hundreds of locations like this is Chiang Mai and that is something that makes Chiang Mai such a special place. We don't have to re-use the same couple of sites over and over again, we can go months without ever repeating the same one. This mixed with the fact that it is considered a great achievement to find unused territory for a run, means that everyone that sets trails is always looking for something new and exciting.
Come join us if you want; we still do at least 3 runs per week
On On!
