coastweek

Coastweek - - The August threshold of the changing seasons in Kenya was very evident in the afternoon of last Saturday's Hash Run in Mtwapa.

The hare was none other than Trevor, who decided to sweat it out with the locals in Trashy Mtwapa.

Braving the sun after a comfortable shady cool spell, the pack gathered at the northern verge of Mtwapa town.

The trail, for the most part ran through the indiscriminate human settlement with its perpetual partner -Trash.

Trash was everywhere, kite like flying, or sedentary heaps, uncollected, solid, liquid and everything in-between; no one knows who is responsible for this job, I mean collection, not creation.

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And the children, frolicking with the poultry, lesser cattle and delicious potato bhajias by the road side completed a picture of colorfully vibrant settlement.

This succeeded in sufficiently reducing the runners' speed to a crawl, if the ugly road block created by the jua-kali engineering job of laying a culvert above a road and thereby framing a veritable hillock on the road did not !

The sore Hashers were informed by a reliable source that this was done by the government engineers with mitumba degrees, which read upside down !

How the waters in a torrential stream, if they came, were to know that they were supposed to climb up, is a mystery.

Once clear of this work of art, a civil engineering masterpiece, the greenery that is still untouched except by the red dust that is the trade mark of this region emerged with the mango blossoms in bloom and cashews following the same dance.

The farms with produce ready for harvest, fruits ready for plucking and trees still in canopied foliage, gave good trail settings and refreshed the runners.

Eric "L.D" was in no mood for his marathon practices and coolly homed on to the Mnazi den, which was not officially a part of the run.

Thereafter, the circle sat down to an impromptu wet hold and much to the amazement of the local revelers, partook of the nectar after dutifully appeasing the ancestors in the ground.

The namesake, graduated with the ceremony to a" straight bottler" after spending five decades as a teetotaler !

Keeping to the green verge, skirting the KARI station, and taking on the highway at a tangent, the pack trickled back to home base for a well earned 'down-down' sitting (or is it a standing ?) ceremony only to be joined by the a late Hasher "Mouth" and a councilor in making practicing his political homework.

The pack congregated at the Kaloleni water pumping station on Nairobi Road, after doing a treacherous five kms. of back, bone and body breaking trek in the poor Japanese contraptions.