We held off as long as we could but it seems as though the Covid hysteria has made its way back up to Chiang Mai along with most of the rest of Thailand.
Although we are not as of yet required to not operate, we are doing this at the advice of our friend inside the police force here in Chiang Mai as a courtesy and to not ruffle any feathers.
All events for August have been cancelled until further notice.
We had a good run there for a bit, we managed to get in 5 and a half weeks of runs and actually had much better attendance than we had expected. We even picked up a few new potential members who are "stuck" in the country for the foreseeable future.
We are not required to do this but when everyone else seems to be deserting the streets and not meeting up in groups we realize that it would only take a few photos from some overzealous tattle-tale to end up on social media and we could find ourselves on the receiving end of some undue hatred.
We don't socially distance at our events and will never do so either. It is just better for us to close down for now and wait until we get the green light from our buddies in the brown, ill-fitting uniforms at the police station.
In the meantime we'll probably do some social events over Zoom or something along those lines to keep the beer flowing and perhaps host some virtual events where everyone just goes around their own neighborhoods around the world and then gets together for a virtual circle at the end to drink some beers together.
Who knows, maybe we could even have some virtual "ice" for someone to sit on and sing some songs and drink some beer. Maybe "Dr. Byte" could help us out with the technology side of things because most of us are nincompoops when it comes to computers and he teaches it at university. I hope for the sake of his employment that he knows how to organize something like this.
In the meantime, we'll be sure to let you all know when and if we can get back up and running and drinking because even though it has only been a week of off time, I think I speak for all the local Hashers when I say that we already miss it.
Old image, the closure is actually from August onwards