Andorra Hash House Harriers - Running and Drinking in the Mountains

If you need to alter some details (e.g. the date or venue) of a run you have volunteered to set, do so from here.

If you have to cancel the Hash you have volunteered for, do so from here. You cannot remove one that has already been run, obviously.

Once you have used the above system to volunteer for a Hash you 'own' your entry. That is, you are responsible for managing it.* Usually, you should not have to do anything else but there are a few situations where you will be required to act. These are:-

1. Your run has to be cancelled, most likely due to bad weather but it might be because you are called away unexpectedly or have fallen ill.
2. You realise that you have double booked yourself and the other event is more important (surely not!).
3. You need to change the venue, hare or date for some reason.
4. You have booked a date without specifying a venue and need to update your entry to tell us where it is going to be.

The only thing to notice is that in the case of a Hash cancelled at the last minute due to the weather you have until 6:00PM on the day of the run to either cancel the entry or re-schedule it.

*The site administrator has access to all aspects of the site and can alter or delete any Hash record but prefers not to have to except as a last resort.

A note about cookies

Cookies are not only confined to the computer they are set on, they are actually confined to the browser being used when they are set. So, if you use - say - Opera to volunteer for a run but also have Firefox installed, you can only use Opera to do any editing of that hash. None of the cookies are available to Firefox (or any other browser).

On a slightly cheerier note, although you need to be browsing in Andorra to get the 'log-in' cookie, once it is set you can volunteer from anywhere you happen to have your computer and internet access.

A 'Hash' is a strenuous walk following a trail of marks for about 60-90 minutes. Usually there are also one or two easier trails for the less energetic. You can run if you wish but most do not. At the end of the hash there are free beers and soft drinks.

A Hash is organised in a different part of Andorra each Saturday from April to December, and the trail is set by a different person (the 'hare') each week. The location is announced at the hash the previous week, and by email and, of course, at the top of this site.

After you have done ten hashes and been a hare you are presented with a Hash T-shirt. You get another award after 25, 50 and 100 hashes, providing you have been a hare since the previous award.

'Hash Bashes' in the form of dinners, picnics and barbecues are held about six times each year. For dinners in restaurants you get a subsidy if you have done five hashes in the last twelve months, and a larger subsidy if you have done ten hashes and been a hare. Recently we have also organised an annual two-day 'Away Hash' staying at a hotel in France or Spain.

Each hasher pays a fee (currently 2 Euros) for each week that he takes part, to pay for the drinks, the awards, the subsidies and some small expenses. School-age children are free.

Andorra is high, the countryside can be tough and the Hash House Harriers do not know if you are fit enough to take part. You do so entirely at your own risk and you need to be sure that you have the right clothes, equipment and accident insurance.

Come and join us!

You can contact the Hash by using the form in the Contact section.

DO NOT TAKE ANY RISKS.

Hash trails are marked with lines or arrows of white flour or chalk, or strips of toilet paper. There should be a mark at least every hundred paces and at junctions of paths - if there is not, you may be going wrong and you should re-trace your steps. If you come to a circle with radial lines marked S, M and L, it indicates alternative trails (short, medium and long) which you can choose depending how fit you are feeling.

A 'Check point' is a circle with radial lines. Only one of the radial lines is the correct trail. The other(s) are 'false trails' A false trail will have two more marks at the usual intervals and then a large cross. If you come to a cross, you have to go back to the check point and try again. If you pass three good marks, you know you are on the correct trail.

Those at the front should call 'ON-ON' occasionally to indicate to followers that they are on the correct track. These calls should be repeated in relay down the line to help those further back and to reassure stragglers.

At the end of each hash we check that everyone is back. ABORT: If you discontinue the Hash before the end you MUST let someone know, otherwise we will waste a lot of time looking for you.

In the 1930's there was still an Empire and British citizens could be found on every continent spreading their culture, including Harriers clubs.

One such citizen, Albert Stephen Ignatius Gispert (known to his friends, and hereafter referred to, as 'G'), was an accountant working for a firm which had several branches in the far East. He was also a keen paper chaser and when, in 1938, he was transferred to Kuala Lumpur he discovered that the city did not have a functioning Harriers club. So he formed one. The initial discussions had taken place in the Selangor Club Chambers, whose cuisine was definitely not 'haute' and was known to its clientele as the 'Hash House', so it was decided that the club would be named the Hash House Harriers and G had the brilliant but simple idea of putting the emphasis on the social side rather than the competitive aspect of the sport. This almost certainly accounts for the popularity and persistence of the hash and definitely accounts for the description of hashers best put as 'drinkers with a running problem'.

For the next 3 years hashes were ran regularly and they celebrated the 100th run in August 1941. Then the Japanese invaded and all frivolous activity stopped. Unfortunately, G did not survive the hostilities but was killed in action on February 11th, 1942. Many hashes stage a memorial run on or about the anniversary.

After the war, a founder member Ronald 'Torch' Bennett (hashers are fond of nicknames or Hash Handles) re-established the hash which ran on Monday evenings. For the next few years, during the Communist insurgence in the Malay peninsular, hashes continued to be run often courting disapproval from the authorities.

The hash's spread across the world was not instantaneous. It is generally agreed that the second chapter was formed in Bordighera, Italy in 1947 and was popular with British ex-servicemen. In the early '60's it too stopped, for different reasons, but was re-established in 1984. The third hash started in Singapore in 1962 followed by a gradual spread through Malaysia and Indonesia and by the time the Kuala Lumpur Hash, now referred to as the Mother Hash, ran its 1500th event in 1973 there were 35 known chapters around the world. Servicemen, diplomats and oil-workers have mainly been responsible for seeding the global hash community and it is reckoned that about 2000 hashes are active today.

As implied above, the Hash House Harriers does not take itself too seriously and, indeed, has a mis-management structure. The mis-management committee consists of at least a Hash Master and an On-Sec (honourary secretary) although in small hashes they may be the same person. Most chapters will have two Joint Masters, a Hash Cash (treasurer), a Haberdasher (who looks after the inventory of shirts etc. given out as awards), a Beer Master (responsible for the supply of drinks at the Down-Down), a Hare Raiser (persuader of usually reluctant hounds to change their genus for a week), a Religious Advisor (guardian of hash traditions, Master-of-Ceremonies) and a Hash Scribe (who does things like this). There are other posts which could be filled but many Hashes have difficulty finding enough volunteers to serve in those mentioned. The committee is elected periodically, the term is usually one year, but often the only way to get off it is to re-locate!

The committee's main purpose is to ensure the week-to-week functioning of the chapter. Important things like policy matters are best left to a general conscensus known as the 'Whim of the Pack'.

Membership

To become a member of a hash is simplicity itself. Just find out where the nearest one is being held and turn up. Although there are a few hashes with traditions of restricted membership the vast majority are open to everyone with the one proviso that they have a sense of humour! There are no membership cards and no obligation to take part every week but many hashes endeavour to keep your custom by offering bribes such as tee-shirts and stuff when a certain number of runs have been completed (often a turn at being a hare is also required to qualify). Hashes which do this and those which don't finish at pubs but supply drinks at the 'Down-Down' tend to charge a small subscription to cover costs.

As mentioned earlier, the social side of hashing is more important than the exercise and throughout the year the mis-managment will organise several non-running events called Hash Bashes. These typically involve things like dinners, barbecues and picnics and some 'subscription hashes' subsidise the cost of these to regular hashers.

2010 sees the introduction of version 7 of this web site.

The obvious differences to the previous version are the tabbed user interface (UI), the much larger maps and the new colour scheme. (Provided you have not disabled JavaScript in which case you will only notice the colour change, More on this later.)

Another 'improvement' is that there is now a much easier way to volunteer to be a Hare on-line. The old way is still available but, at the moment, it is not possible to do so without JavaScript.

Other than the above and the maps, all the relevant information that the site offers is accessible. The scripts merely make the user experience (UX) a little more pleasant.

The UI is implemented using the jQuery JavaScript Framework and some of the many plug-ins available for it.

The interactive maps use the OpenLayers library to manipulate mapping data supplied by the OpenStreetMap project.

Other custom written scripts are also employed in the control of things like AJAX handling of forms etc.

The page you are reading is an HTML document generated by a PHP script on the web server which also handles some other tasks such as sending out the hash e-mail and producing the RSS feed.

The look of the site is controlled by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). As with JavaScript, disabling CSS will not affect the information shown. It will just look a bit boring and untidy.

I am committed to making this web site as accessible as possible. This means that the documents that make up its parts should be well-formed with valid, semantic mark-up, valid Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and error free scripts.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) publishes standards covering the different aspects of web development and guidelines on making accessible sites. They also provide resources for testing documents. There is a mark-up validator and a CSS validator. Other resources are available for checking basic accessibility requirements. I use Cynthia Says. Test this document yourself by following the links.

Web site accessibility is a nebulous and not particularly well documented area and is still the subject much discussion. Some advocates go too far in my opinion so I try to tailor the site to the sort of people who are likely to visit it.

Having said that, from time to time a document may not pass the above tests as I modify my Content Management System and unwittingly introduce an error or a necessary but invalid CSS hack is employed.

If you find a mark-up error, let me know.