Hash Harriers at Section in the Blue Mountains
on George Hamilton (Jamaica), 12/Sep/2011 17:04, 34 days ago
I would like to thank Onyka, Ann and Tim for coming along in the rental car with me and sharing costs and providing company.  How else can you have an adventure in the Jamaican Blue Mountains for just over $10 Canadian?Bearing in mind this was going to be a day of photographs I practiced on the lobster claw plant in Onyka's garden while she packed her bag for the trip. Without company, I might have done fun things like drive slowly along the mountain road, miss the pot holes and take photographs simultaneously, but Onyka saved me from having to do this.  She did the next few scenery photographs.  Thank you Onyka.This is actually a typical Hash Harrier situation - a big pile of jeeps and SUV's heading off into the Jamaican wilderness with no other traffic in sight, luckily for them.This is one of the wider bits of the road. Tim, new to Jamaica, found it amusing when we passed an occasional traffic sign warning of single lane traffic.This is a view getting closer to Section where the hash will be taking place.  The white specks are normal sized houses way down below.  Something was crossing my mind from time to time - a large number of us were heading to a small place on the top of a mountain with narrow roads.My thought was whether there enough flat space around for everyone to park.  I thought it would be fair if the people with jeeps and SUV's parked half way down cliffs leaving the flatter bits closer to the road to those with ordinary cars like us.There was an enexpected, to me, large turnout for this hash with about twice the number of hashers as usual.  As expected the parking was a problem but it could have been worse as parking on the cliffs was unutilized.In the next picture, the main road to Buff Bay is the larger road to the right of the picture and going downhill, quite rapidly, as you will see in the next picture.  Sometimes in the Blue Mountains I hanker for a piece of flat ground to walk on, or a building without millions of steps outside.The road to Buff Bay  went downhill pretty fast, maybe about a couple of car lengths around the corner.  It restarted just to the left of the hydro pole as you look at the picture below.  The size of the road subsistence can be gauged by the group of hashers you can see walking along the edge of it on the far left of the photograph.So how do you get to Buff Bay without a helicopter?  The answer is two photos up where what appears to be a driveway going uphill to the left is really the diversion that takes you around the huge hole.  I must check the definition of a pot hole - maybe this would be a world record?Here is photo of a waterfall at the side of the road.  Not large enough to swim in unfortunately.The wrecked car was to the side of the road as we continued going down and down and down the Buff Bay Road for nearly an hour.  Was this part of a road accident with the nearby red car, even more mashed up, or had they been taken there by a tow truck and dumped?  That's Jamaica for you, sometimes there are more questions than answers.Another unanswered question, this one raised by Tim, why was there a street light in the middle of nowhere?  Sort of close to it was a large single rock near the  side of the road.  The rock was about half the size of the rented Yaris, but probably weighed quite a lot more.  My guess, whether right or wrong, was that the light was there to stop unobservant drivers with non-working  headlights drive into the rock during the night.The real worry warts were thinking that after doing our down and down and down part of the hash that the only way back to the starting point was to go up and up and up again to return to the elevation we started from.  Actually they were correct, but not completely correct.  The only way back was to go up and up and up and up back to end up at a point even higher than our starting point.  This brought you to a mystery paved road going downhill. A quick personal diversion here from the Quebec Laurentian Mountains.  I didn't know this beforehand so I must have been having a deja vu of my Sainte Agathe des Monts experience.  Note the plural Monts - I didn't at the time.  There was more than one mountain involved.  I thought I was pretty smart when I went back to the hospital that I knew was at the summit, without a map.  All I had to do was go uphill.  Right?  Wrong.  The key first step was to pick the correct mountain to drive up.  At the summit of the wrong mountain I was able to see the hospital in clear sight on the right mountain.  Only a half mile away as the crow flies, but then I'm not a crow.Back to this weekend.  There's a shortage of roads up in the Blue Mountains as it's very difficult to construct them.  The road I was seeing could only be one of two roads - either the road to Buff Bay so I would be almost re-starting the loop for a second time, or else the road leading downhill to Section, the starting point. I hadn't thought of the going down one mountain and coming back up a different mountain at the time.  There wasn't as much shredded paper around as I hoped for, but it turned out that this really was the latter road and not the former one.  My legs were thankful for that.There were the usual ceremonies after the race and with the large crowds.  This one seem to go on and on.  It's pretty tough as the after hash food only takes place after the ceremonies end.  However rehydation through Red Stripe beer and pop can start beforehand and is included in the $500J race fee. Being conscious of my passengers I did not go overboard on the Red Stripe and maybe only managed half of one this time round.  I wasn't being excessively virtuous, the reason for this was probably the apple I just had near the end of the hash had filled me up.Still, I think I must have been in violation of the Hasher Constitution as I was meant to be a drinker with a running problem.  I'll check the fine print, maybe.  Hashers don't care.  It's sort of like if you have to ask yourself  if you're a hasher, then you probably aren't.At the end of it all, it was time to zip downhill to Kingston passing Green Hill coffee plantation, Hollywell, through the Hardwar Gap, past Strawberry Hills, Newcastle army base, Mount Edge with its new EIT vegetarian restaurant, Irish Town  and into Papine before I was driving in the dark and moutain mist dodging potholes and successfully making all the turns.Meanwhile my hashing shoes are still just hanging together.  I  must ask Bunty to bring out my boring navy blue well-made Canadian running shoes to replace my Jamaican ones  instead of spending money.  CUSO-VSO volunteers are poor. The shoes I have now are on their last legs and are pretty plain by Jamaican standards.  They lack lime green and gold colouring.  Because I inflicted the visual pain of my Jamaica red shirt on people, I'll spare you with the shoes.   I must confess I like my red shirt - you can put a Canadian flag on top of it, you can't see where the red of the shirt ends and the red of the flag begins.  And it's not an old Canadian flag with faded red either.