R*n Reports

6th of September 2008

To celebrate the Vietnamese National Day (couldn't think of a better excuse) we headed for the Dunes behind Mui Ne (well, that part of the dunes that hasn't got construction going on yet). On Friday, Postman, Hong, Quan and I headed out to set the trail. Hong, as usual, wasn't listening and instead of getting flour he got starch to mark the trail. No problem per se, but as it rained later in the day, we obviously had few marks left by the time we got started next day.

Fairly hard going in places.

This turned out to not really be a problem though: as usual, everybody had forgotten about things like "On on" or "check it out", the r*nners were blasting right through any trail there may have been. Actually "blasting" is maybe exaggerating things a little as most of the r*n was up and down miniature Grand Canyons or in very soft sand, making r*nning fairly hard.

Hounds on trail, not!

Thanks to a huge 4-lane road being built right through the dunes connecting Phan Thiet and Mui Ne (wonder who is managing to line his/her pockets with that particular useless monstrosity?), we managed to have a Jeep with cold beer waiting for us halfway through the r*n/walk/slog. Thus, whilst we sent the r*nners off on a false trail, everybody else had plenty of time to sink a few cold ones.

Good views from the top.

On the whole the r*n was extremely short and it seemed like we had hardly left the beer halt before reaching the end back at the Mui Ne beach front. Hong had planned ahead and there were plenty of cold Tigers waiting for us right on the beach. We did r*n into a very irate lady who decided out of the blue that all the dunes were private property and that she would impose a fine, this blatant attempt at a rip-off was obviously ignored.

Some of the Phan Thiet Hounds just love drinking out of shoes.

The circle went on forever. Not only was the scenery nice and the beer cold; as usual there were plenty of infractions ranging from new shoes (or no shoes at all) to mobiles on the Hash, namings and numerous other excuses to dispense plenty of down-downs. Turn-out was pretty good again, with 30+ hounds (though most of them were Victoria Phan Thiet Resort staff Shanghaied into service).

Not this crowd, though.