hash

Hash

Shira and saying Kwaheri

planning the hash

wazungu in the mist...

freezing, but successful!

someone here is tasty...

no more hashish!

no more hashish!

it is hard to believe that i have completed my very last hash.  well, moshi hash.  i love hashing. there are 5 hash clubs in manhattan, which i am very tempted to look into, esp as our moshi hash is the "child" of a manhattan hash. but greg, the moshi founder, warned me to stay away from the ny hashes.  they are crazy, he said.  in truth, they do look a little crazy. a lot of drinking and running in the pavement city-- a bit different from the beauty of tanzania followed by a good kilimanjaro beer. 

how cute is this? the dog i mean. :p  elliot and ngome are alright as well :)

this, my last hash, was set by greg from his parents' house.  unbelievably beautiful as usual, but also a great hashing finish.  elliot was much too fast, bounding ahead with his puppies.  i was very pole pole as usual. but at least this time i had the excuse of john and my run to kibosho yesterday which so kicked my ass i literally laid on the cement floor for a good ten minutes before i could move again. then i just moved to my bed- a bad choice as i was drenched in sweat.  but oh well.

greg's adorable son gave channa and i a tour of the whole grounds, including his secret fort.  we were very honored. then after everyone left, greg and terry (his wife) had the gardener call out to the bush babies.  yes, that is right.  bush babies. with a little "whoo  whooo"  the bush babies appeared.  they grabbed my fingers with their teeny paws and ate bananas.  fantastic.
the flash was very scary.

hashish and party central

hashish and party central

this is a big weekend for A5. most importantly, we are throwing the big going away party for Susan.  susan has been here for at least 2 years.  in fact she used to live with john when he first moved here.  she and their other roommate karen used to cook for him when he pretended he didn't know how.  she is def one of the coolest people around, plus she has an amazing fashion sense.  i can't imagine how she is getting home all the clothes she has had made.

on top of the parteh, john and i have signed up to set the hash.  this means we pick a location, spend many hours scouting out possible routes, false trails, dangers, etc, and then go back the morning of to actually lay down the flour. plus we provide the beer and bites for the end.  john had the brilliant suggestion to start from the Protea hotel in Machame.  this place is beautiful- set on the cliffs above the river, the valley is full of banana forests and monkeys, and streams criss cross the area above the river. he took mother and i to dinner there last week in order to start negotiations.  normally one would set it from their house or something, so that the end party is at your house. but the drs compound is a bit boring to start from. so we had to negotiate how much beer, cokes, and snacks would cost-as we would have to pay it all upfront and probably won't come near to making it back from the 2500=$2 people pay to participate.

we set out to scout the trail using mother as a barometer for the "wrinklies"- if she felt she could make it, she thought the old people could to. a good idea actually, john and i wanted to torture people and could assuage all guilt by watching her.  you create quite a stir setting a hash.  people are amazed to see wazungu in their area and are freaked out when you come along with white powder making marks in the ground.  when we actually set it, we did our best to explain that it was just ungwa and that it was very salaama. john also, commendably, tried to warn anyone we bumped into that a group of 50 or more wageni (visitors) would be traipsing through...

some boys followed us with their machetes as we got ourselves purposefully lost scouting.  this one kindly chopped away dirt for a foothold in the mud so we could cross this little stream:

hash, not hashish

hash, not hashish

every other weekend is the moshi Hash. the term was unfamiliar to me, though it is an international phenomenon. A hash is a running (though you may walk) trail set by the Hasher of interesting and difficult paths, including false trails. the "hounds" - runners follow a trail marked by spots of flour or sometimes a check marked by an "x." at the check you have to search for which direction to go to pick the trail up again. it all can lead to mass confusion, even once the correct path is found by the front runners. they are meant to leave an arrow pointing the way to the next flour but the arrow never seems to stay put, so you get lost anyway. at the end of the whole thing you celebrate with beer, though we always have other things as well as moshi is a family town. :)

this was only my second hash as i have been paragliding or climbing or at pangani for the others. the first one was a very beautiful walk though a valley and up and down some steep ledges- all through a rural area called Machame that i am unfamiliar with. this one was set from a friend of our's house in moshi proper, but again through an area that i didn't know existed.

having run earlier in the day with john, i contented myself to walk along with Rick (a brit phd student who studies "mwoh-squitoes" as he calls them. ew. kcmc has the best center for malaria research in at least East Africa. doesn't make me feel better about not taking malaria meds while i'm here. he actually pays people to go spend the night in this hut they have built to test different repellents with "wild" mosquitoes.)

Greg, todays hasher, had set a rather difficult path, spreading the flour quite far apart so you really had to search for the next spot. he also put 2 sections straight through the river. fun and challenging if you can jump from rock to rock, but not so fun if you are a "wrinkly" as my mother is now calling herself and all the old people we know, including the pair of octogenarians visiting our friends Kay and Russel that mother was keeping time with. they all managed the first slippery slope into the river bed, but when several young women went sliding off the rocks into the river, everyone paused.

so here we were-the walkers-half the younger across or nearly across, me in the middle, all the wazee (old) on the opposite bank. huge rocks, a deep fast current in cutting the trail. probably for the best, they decided the wrinklies should stop and climb straight up the bank back to the last pasture. all well and good, except that Barney, Kay and Russel's fabulous huge dog that i love had already carefully bounded his way over half the huge rocks. Barney, though he adores hashes and quivers near to heart attack at the thought of them, very faithfully runs back and forth checking on them throughout the trail. there was no way for him to go one way and them another unless he was leashed. so they called him back again. but the rocks were not made for crossing both directions.

just as he reached me, his back feet slipped and he went careening into the water. the current immediately swept him backwards down the river. he paddled and paddled as we all started shouting, but the current was too strong. he managed to grip his little front claws on a small rock, but was too exhausted to pull himself up. i looked down at his soaked, petrified face peering up through the water, his toenails scratching helplessly on the small rock as his huge body swam against the current.

i plunged in. stupid perhaps, but what can you possibly do? leave him? there was no way to haul him up as he was. the current grabbed me, pulling me past him, but i managed to get hold of a boulder just behind barney. lodging my body against the rock i could wedge myself underneath barney's flailing legs, letting him rest. russel meanwhile climbed down over the first rocks, kay right behind him. once he had caught his breath russel pulled his front paws up and he was able to use me as a step ladder. barney gone, i slipped myself, flying back, the water up to my shoulders, and had to grab hands to catch the rock again.

though he was out of the water, we still had to get him across the river one way or another. deciding he couldn't make it backwards we sent him on across to the young people. with his leash around my neck, i half swam, half climbed the rest of the way across. kay decided she better come to, just in case something happened--dogs are feared terribly in tanzania, even though he is completely sweet.


i'm glad those of us that did made it on as the trail had all sorts of fun, confusing bits. at one point we had to crawl belly first through some hedges near the hidden prison. but i'm also glad the wrinklies turned around. break a hip in moshi and the only thing to do is fly immediately to europe or america to be attended to. seriously!