Sorry this took so long. We were
in Panama for a couple of weeks and I forgot to take care of this before we
left.
CARDIFF,
WALES
Cardiff, Wales
was a quick trip for Dave and me -- just a one hour flight.
We live in
Ireland, so the weather was no surprise. Not too cold, not
too hot, a bit too
wet. Never mind that...the most important thing was, we
got to catch up with
our Malaysian friends...Chinnathambi, T.T. Kang, Lynn,
Balan, Pak Sek Kok,
Debbie, Sing Sung, not to mention Suzan and Peter Batey.
Seeing everyone
truly was the best part.
Now, I’d only been to one Interhash before and
it was in Hobart, and that
was of the highest standard. Wales was nowhere
near matching it. The first
night at the Millennium stadium the food was
under par and the queues were
ridiculous. The entertainment was a joke and
just getting a drink was a
hassle. To their credit, though, the Welsh were
able to sort it out by the
second night.
The runs, on the other hand,
were very well done from the start. Any problems
we had there were of our own
doing. We showed up too late on Saturday
morning to get a seat on the bus for
the run we wanted to do, so we wound up
doing run #10, which was not even one
of the ones we had looked at. It was a
good run, though, with a fun circle
and plenty of food and drink. The bus
trip home was particularly entertaining
as we had a sing-along headed by a
Kiwi who had a repertoire of hash songs as
long as your arm.
For Sunday’s run, we showed up in time to get a seat on
the bus we wanted.
The run was laid on terribly rocky terrain, with far too
many uphills, but
the beer break was at a hillside pub. Seeing the looks on
the faces of the
local Sunday pub-goers as they approached this normally
quiet little pub
which was inundated with 80 hashers was well worth the rocky
climb to get
there. The trip home, though, quieter than the previous day’s
bus ride, was
entertaining in its own right. The microphone was available to
anyone who
wanted to tell a joke or sing a song. And several people did just
that.
The closing night was bittersweet because of all the goodbyes. Who
knows
when we’ll meet again...maybe we’ll visit Malaysia or maybe we’ll meet
at
the next Interhash in Chiang Mai. No matter what, we’ll always have
Cardiff,
won’t we?
Kindest
regards,
Sue