I'll be honest, it is mostly a bunch of fat dudes sitting around a drinking beer, but we do actually get some exercise as well.
Also, sometimes our runs take us to areas in the countryside that we would be very unlikely to visit otherwise and at least here in Chiang Mai, there is so much wilderness once you get just a little ways out of the city.
Chiang Mai is known as the "city of a thousand temples" and while I think that is a massive exaggeration of exactly how many temples there are, there certainly are a lot of them and many of them are waaaay out of town and are not on the tourist trail. In the years that I have been involved with the Chiang Mai HHH I have been dropped off in the bus because I never check where the trails are going to be beforehand because I like surprises.... and there have been some amazing sights to be seen that I wouldn't have come across otherwise.
How something like this can exist and almost no one knows about it is just incredible to me and we choose temple grounds for our starting points on a regular basis because the monks are normally very happy to allow us to use the surrounding grounds if we make a donation to the temple. We are of course very respectful of the actual religious artifacts and we don't hoot and holler unless we are well away from the actual temple buildings.
Sometimes, when our trails meander around the outskirts of the temples we will find things that people who regularly come to these temples for actual religious purposes probably aren't even aware are there such as this thing.
When I call it a "thing" I mean no disrespect, I just don't know what it is actually called. This one was about a km away from the main temple grounds and didn't look like it had a great deal of maintenance involved.
I always run with my camera on these runs because you never know when you are going to encounter something beautiful, or scenic, or just one-of-a-kind that most people probably will never see in their lives.
That being said, I lied before... The Hash is mostly about a bunch of fat dudes drinking beer
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