It's normally an objective of ours to get out runs to be as filled with nature as possible but this isn't always easy to accomplish when the city we are in has more than 1 million people in it and the area is constantly expanding, or so it seems. While there is some protected government land around Chiang Mai, nearly all of the private land has already been developed or is in the process of developing into something urban.
Basically, it is getting harder for us to find genuine nature for a lot of our runs because we are not all that interested in spending an hour in transit each way just to do one of our runs.
Thankfully, there are a few key spots that are still available and this particular one will probably not be over-developed for quite some time due to the rather mountainous terrain.
There are a few access roads out here for farmers, but for the most part the area is completely uninhabited. This is one of those spots where once again, we don't have permission to enter the land but there is a sort of unspoken understanding between us and the owners that we are not there to cause any harm, and I believe they have noticed that we always leave nothing behind when we visit and we also clean up a bunch of jungle plastic while we are there. The owners don't seem to have a problem with us coming here and during the scouting process that was done by "Superman" and "Paperboy" in the past week, nothing was said to them about being on the land and when the run took place, we only saw a couple of locals as we were doing our activities and they were all smiles and waves!
You can tell from the GPS Satellite map that other than our starting and end points, that all of this run was done without being around much of any civilization at all. This is exactly the sort of runs that I, and most of the others in our group, like to do more than any other.
It really is kind of crazy how quickly parts of this city can turn from busy highway, loads of houses, and a bunch of expanding businesses, to a totally quiet jungle environment that is mostly untouched, in just a couple of kilometers. I fear that in the not so distant future that all of this land will be eventually developed, and when that time comes the Chiang Mai Hash House Harriers might start to face a few difficulties as far as getting jungle runs in. Our close access to nature is what makes our Hash so much fun and is kind of the envy of other Hash chapters in Thailand. No offense to Bangkok, Phuket, Samui, and Pattaya, but all of their runs are urban runs with very little in the way of nature involved in it at all.
Our runs are different and completely lacking in cement and I really hope we can manage to keep it that way as much as possible in the coming years.
We are still doing at least 3 runs per week and all are welcome to come and join us. You do not need to have a membership in order to come along and we do not raise the prices on new members. You also do not need to be in great shape in order to join in. The only thing you need to do is be capable of walking, and it is helpful if you don't mind (or even like) having a few beers with some funny people that will almost certainly become your friends afterwards. You can get the full deets on any upcoming run at our official and poorly-made website
On On!