A very strange discovery on a recent run

One of the most awesome thing that a member can do for the rest of us is to introduce us to a special trail or location in Chiang Mai that the others have never been to. This is known as "virgin territory" and given the amount of time that a lot of us have been doing this in the jungle of the area, it isn't an easy task to accomplish.

I don't know if people get tipped off by locals or how it is that some of these places are ever found, but every now and then someone finds something truly unusual in the middle of nowhere, then takes us all to see it on a run.

Ronald McDonald statues are not that unusual in Thailand and the rest of Asia that I have been to but here is the real difference: Normally they are outside of a McDonalds.

This was outside of some farmhouse in the middle of somewhere that people generally would never go to.

This was not some popular space like a restaurant or coffeeshop either, this was just someone's land next to a small lake that was more like a minnow pond than an actual lake. How it is that it took us this long to discover it is quite a surprise because this stands out in the country, that is for sure.

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It's impossible to know if this statue was made by McDonalds then given away, or if it was stolen from a McDonalds. I'm going to take a middle ground and say that it was made by the owner of the land or someone else. It is unlikely that McD's gave it away because that isn't something that this company does. I guess they have to protect their intellectual property or something corporate sounding like that.

Our only attachment to McDonalds is that that downtown location of McDonalds in Chiang Mai has been our bus pick up point and meetup point for all runs over the past many years - as long as I have been a part of it. So this discovery by one of our members was particularly special.

You never know what you are going to get on a Hash Run. Sometimes people take us to an area that is super special because of the scenery or water features, and other times the person whose idea it was to take us somewhere is rooted in something silly like this.

The terrain at this particular run wasn't all that great and left a lot of us wondering why the guy who set the trail had brought us out here. We later would put him on the ice and ask "don't lie to us, you brought us out here for the McDonald statue didn't you?" He didn't even try to lie, that was the reason and well, I guess it is a pretty good one.

If you want to be a part of our shenanigans all are welcome to come and join us on our thrice weekly runs (sometimes more often than that!) we meet up before the runs at the downtown McDonalds near Thae Pae Gate that everyone already knows, visitors and residents alike. Full details can be found at our official website

On On!