An overhead view shows how Chiang Mai is special
Published on HivePostify by @chaingmai.hhh · Tue Aug 04 2026
I have been Hashing all over the world but there are few locations that feel as though they were actually designed for Hashing and fortunately the area I live in is one of them. If a place is filled with a ton of nature normally it is not filled with enough people to have a Hash House Harriers. If a place is filled with enough people to have a Hash House Harriers, there is normally not enough nature because it has all been destroyed for housing and shopping and roads and what not. Chiang Mai has destroyed a lot of the nature, but it is surrounded by protected wildlife reserves as well as land that has been designated by the government as agricultural.
Will this change in the future? Well, probably. We all know that money drives everything in this crazy world and once the sums are big enough that rule will be changed as well. But for the time being runs like the overhead that I am going to show you right now, is what makes Chiang Mai and the CMH3 so special.
You can tell on the right of this image that we are very near large highways and near those highways are plenty of urban stuff. At the start of our run we were only about 700 meters from one the major highways for all of Chiang Mai, but just a bit out of the way is mostly untouched rainforest as well as some farms.
As usual, we are trespassing on this land so we are extra careful to not disturb anyone and we travel with trash bags and clean up the place of trash that others have left behind or that has been blown in there. We NEVER litter and we clean up everything we bring with us, which isn't very much.
We do drink beer and bring a couple of really big ice blocks with us, but ice melts and turns into water and we always take all of our beer cans with us. We also normally leave all of these sites with at least 1 rather large back of rubbish that we discovered on the trail.
There are not many instances of land-owners getting pissed off about us running on their land but that doesn't change the fact that we do not ask for permission. In the rare instance that someone tried to get all uppity about us being on their land they were just kind of assholes about it and obviously we will comply even though we are there kind of doing a free service by picking up all the trash that is on their land.
Once we get over to the left side of the picture though, this isn't actually anyone's land. Well, it's the government's land but any time some park ranger or whatever has approached us about entering that land they are normally afraid to try to speak to foreigners and all we do is show the bag of trash - a bag that it actually that guy's job to obtain - and they have left us alone. There has only been a single instance of someone truly taking us to the cleaners so to speak, and the police got involved.
We know the police, we do events with the police, we have a policeman in our ranks, so that didn't go anywhere for the looky-loo Karen that was hoping to get a bunch of silly-dressed foreigners in trouble that day.
I got side-tracked. Having access to this level of nature is something that I will never take for granted here in Chiang Mai. There are over a million people living here but yet if you just get a few km's out of town you have wonderful green and silent nature. There are not many places in the world that can boast this and certainly not on the level that Chiang Mai has it. We can do a different trail every week and not have any repeats in a year if we really set our minds to it.
We are still doing at least 3 runs per week and all are welcome. If you are interested go check out our [poorly made official website!](http://www.chiangmaihhh.com)
ON On!
Tags: #thailand#life#asean#chiangmai#nature#running#hashhouseharriers#hhh