Yellow Christmas

We were off in the desert yesterday evening. It was the Jeddah Hash House Harriers Christmas do, and they had arranged for Santa to turn up in the back of a trailer being pulled by a four wheel drive.

It was in the same place as the Bonfire Night event, back in November (0f course), and regular readers will remember that I said we'd got completely stuck in the sand and ended up having to be pulled out backwards by another car. This time, in the green machine, there were no such problems. In fact, we managed slightly better than one of our party who couldn't reverse out through the sand.

The walk we went on was a lot easier as well. It appears to be the middle of nowhere, and it's at least half an hour from our place on the outskirts of Jeddah, but there were new concrete wells in the sand and small walls stretching from the bottom of the hills all the way over to the other side. One of the regular Hashers said that the land has been divided up between people and the walls marked the division. It seemed to me that they were just splitting one bit of featureless rocky hillside from another but I suppose it may one day be cultivatable or open to development.

James was hanging on to the lady from the creche, again. I don't know why he's so attached to her but she is very caring towards him and put some mosquito repellent on him, which we hadn't even thought of. Hannah marched on, encouraging Kim as usual. Most of the walk was on gentle slopes, which was handy for us as well as the kids. The main run was probably up and down the steepest hills, at pace, and none of us have any interest in that.


When we got back to the parking area the organisers had set up a grotto in the sand, with Christmas trees and fairy lights and a fireplace. Santa eventually turned up about an hour later and the kids lined up to get their presents. The whole thing was very well organised; not just in terms of creating two levels of walk for beginners and experts, but also to bring all the Santa stuff out to the desert, getting the presents for the kids (and making them appropriate to their age and gender) and looking after everyone when they were there. The Hash in K****t seemed to be just a lot of alcoholics getting together to do silly things between drinks but this group, although they keep trying to get us to do pseudo-Scouting songs in an attempt to 'bond', do seem to be a genuine social group, as opposed to just boozers.

I've got quite a lot of pictures of the evening which I'll download later.