Only recently a member of the Chiang Mai Hash House Harriers started posting satellite overviews of our runs and to me at least, they always look a lot less nice than the actual way the trails look on the ground. From above, it appears as though we are just running around some farms and also the ground looks terribly dead from space because as I am sure most people are aware, these satellite overlays are not live and I guess they were taken at a very dry period of time in the past.
That all looks dead and dry, which I suppose it does look dead and dry during the dry season but here is the thing: Thailand is a tropical country and most of the year the area is lush and green. It is just rather unfortunate timing as to when Google decided to snap the image of the area..
our runs are a lot more likely to look like this than not especially since we specifically choose our locations in places that have some semblance of untouched or non-destroyed jungle in it. I will admit though that a lot of our runs take place around farms just like the above satellite image would suggest.
You see, Chiang Mai has over a million people in it, but it encompasses a lot of land and much of that land is still farmland. Even when you get near something like a busy shopping mall or a busy highway, chances are you are not very far away from some sort of lush greenery or mostly uncultivated spaces of land.
Some of it is dry during certain times of year but I guess it is just a little strange for me to see the satellite image look so brown when what we are actually looking at on the ground looks more like this.
Maybe it is just something to do with how satellites take pictures. I don't get it and am not very tech savvy but when these images end up getting posted online I feel like our sat images give people the wrong impression.
So if you are thinking of perhaps coming on a run with us some time in the future and do happen to stop by our website you will probably notice the sat maps first and that is not a good representation of what our runs are actually like.
In the years that I have been doing this I can only in my mind think about one run that I would consider overly dry and that was during the dry/burning season. Even that run was mostly covered in foliage and just a few km were out in the open and with dry dirt.
At the end of the day Chiang Mai, as well as the rest of Thailand, is a tropical country that gets much more rainfall that most of the rest of the world, even during our traditional "dry season."
Most of the time we are in danger of it being far too muddy rather than any real risk of it being too dry.
As always I am letting people know that we are still doing 3 runs per week on Mondays (men only), Thursdays (mixed groups) and Saturdays (mixed groups). The women only Bunny Hash does normally at least one run a month but they don't keep a schedule, you'll have to visit our website in order to figure that out.
ON On!
