Venue: Bukit Beruntung-Rasa Road
Hare: Steve Robinson
Co-hare: John Dodgson
Scribe: Juicy Rump
The hare and his co-hare were very quick to pounce on this area, generally still considered virginal, made accessible by the recently opened link between Bukit Beruntung and Rasa. This, in fact, was their second effort, although their roles were reversed, I understand. Fact is, the area we ran today has been ‘covered’ from many different vantages in the past. But starting from a new run site gave the run a different, interesting twist.
Owing to the concurrent Pan Asia Hash being held in Kuching, the decimated pack of stayed-behinds were understandably much less than your usual Saturday crowd. Tucked into a corner tarmac of the poorly occupied housing estate, the pack was whisked off sharply at 4.30pm straight towards the moonscape adjacent to the abandoned palms; thirty, forty acres of cut-and-fill effort laid to waste by an over-ambitious developer caught in the frenzy of the last economic boom.
The 1st check was cleverly placed a hundred meters up a bukit, and had at least half the pack caught. Papers were found back and on the lower slope, veering to the left along the palms. A pleasant trot for about 7min took the runners to the edge of the palms where the 2nd check was encountered. As myself and some others were still descending from the hill having been caught by the 1st check, a somewhat comical scene developed below us, seeing the pack responding like a swarm of bees to the calls of On On, and then abruptly stopped and about-turned to the shouts of false trail!
The trail was quickly discovered on the bottom of a denuded ravine, and took the runners along a run-off stream overgrown with those nasty elephant grass that has blades as sharp as knives if one gets sliced at the wrong angle. Inexplicably, however, the trail went for only 200m from start to check #3, which was really short. The pack spread out and fanned in all directions forward and up both hills to the left and right. It took at least 10min of intense scrutinizing before someone went backward and found papers just a little way up a bramble-covered slope.
We inched our way up in single-file following the path cut by maintenance crew of the pylons, avoiding the rough and tough needle-like branches of the brambles, and got to the base of a pylon where papers led off to the left along the ridge for an obvious check #4. Shouts of On On was called from the lower reaches of the steep slope, and the hashers scrambled like a pack of migratory wildebeests (at least that’s what Charles Lee described it) down the slope, kicking up a storm of dusts that was scorched dry by the hot spell and a recent fire. The trail, however, turned out to be a falsie, but the actual trailed was easily found in the opposite direction, to the right. A good stretch of running ensued, mainly going gently downhill, for about 1km. The succeeding check #5 proved to be quite a dud, and the papers to the left of it enabled another stretch of good jogging. When we got to the grassland just before the road, there was a bit of disarray due to styrofoams that resembled papers so much that the runners were confused momentarily. The confusion was quickly cleared, and papers continued to the edge of the road and, promptly, check #6.
Papers were found on the other side of the road, through a 3m tunnel that spans it. A whole lot of SCBs took the opportunity to take the obvious shortcut home. But from there, the runners were taken on a circuitous 2.5km through estate trails, with another 2 checks thrown in. FROPs arrived back in 1hr 18min, which was just right.
All in all, a great effort, although the promise of water and flooding was not kept!
Posted by onsec at September 28, 2005 09:10 AM