Desert Hash

I took the dogs to the hash yesterday. It's been a few months since we last went. The hashes are usually off camp and I struggle with finding someone willing to take me and the dogs. On top of that, I kind of feel like I am held hostage--I can't pick up and leave when I want. But I ran into one of the regular hashers at a party last weekend and she chided me for not coming to the hash anymore. Ah, the guilt card. So I sucked it up and arranged a ride.

It was quite hot, about 115F when we left Dhahran at 4:30pm. The hashers like to head out into the remote desert and it is often a little cooler there.

I took a ton of water for the dogs--a couple of liters to wet them down before we started, another 2 liters for them to drink and to wet them during the run, and then a small ice chest filled with ice water to wet them again when we returned to the cars.

Evaporative cooling doesn't work for the dogs unless you wet them to their skin. That isn't too hard with the smooth foxes but you can't just toss water on them and call it good. I usually make sure their groin areas are very wet--those large femoral arteries can move a lot of heat around.

Mimi drinks plenty on her own but I have to work to make sure Harry drinks enough.

Still, he's quite the tough little guy. Well over 100F by the time we started and he's bopping around, peeing on bushes, checking out camel poop, sticking his nose in lizard holes (hopefully those were lizard holes and not camel spider holes--eek). We were out for more than an hour, jogging up and down dunes. Both of the dogs were enthusiastic to the end.

Afterward, everyone sat around in a giant circle drinking beer and passing potato chips around. Harry kept the group entertained as he followed the course of the chip bag around from person to person! Boy, he knows how to work a crowd! The non-dog-savvy folks quickly learned not to casually drop their hand full of chips right in front of his face. He has no shame!

Mimi was of course tied to me on a leash but she managed to get a fair share of "dropped" chips from the folks on either side of me.

A tired dog is a good dog! Sadly, all that time and effort will only keep them down for a couple of days before they are bouncing off the walls again.

More Desert Adventures

Fox terriers in tan-colored desert landscape.

DSL thinks that I'm just putting the same photo up over and over--"fox terriers in tan-colored desert landscape"! She says she can't tell the difference. I thought this was funny because this had occurred to me too.

But I assure you, every photo is new. And in this post, you will be entertained by even more pictures of dogs in the desert!

Harry leading the way up to the jebels.

I have found a new place to take the dogs for weekend and evening walks. It's an area of perhaps a dozen jebels separated by deep wadis located to the northwest of my house. It is accessed by a parking lot next to a soccer field. I can even get in an hour's walk/run with the dogs after work. The topography provides a considerable cardio challenge for all three of us. I guesstimate there may be a couple of hundred feet of elevation difference between the top of the highest jebel and the deepest wadi. Doesn't sound like much but when you scramble up and down that half a dozen times in an hour, well, it can be fairly challenging.

GoogleEarth image. Pins mark my house and the jebels to the NNW. Click on the image to expand it.

The rocks exposed in Dhahran are part of the Dammam Dome, an anticlinal fold with four-way closure. Every rock you can see is some sort of sabkha carbonate deposited in a restricted marine setting. Sabkha carbonates later exposed in desert environments erode into interesting but quite jagged surfaces that are related to their original depositional environment...but this isn't supposed to be a geology lecture. After our first trip into the jebels, I learned that I needed to wear my boots (trail shoes were simply not up to the task). The dogs' feet are quickly toughening up on the exposed rock.

Investigating interesting cracks.

The jebels are now our preferred exercise location. I can exhaust the dogs with a good hour of scrambling several times a week and stay out there for a couple of hours on weekend mornings. The vistas across camp are interesting, there are plenty of holes and crevices for the dogs to sniff about, we've only seen one other person out there so far (quite a change from the crowds walking around the golf course in the evenings), and it has never been a primary trash dump for camp so it is just nicer to walk around there than in the trash tip and the spray fields.

Looking SSE towards Khobar and the Arabian Gulf.

Yesterday, we had another desert adventure when we went out with the hash again. This particular run wasn't all that great (it was far too long) but the scenery was nice and the company around the fire afterwards was entertaining.

My little social butterfly Harry at the start of the hash.

This hash was an open desert run with a lot of soft sand/dune scrambling. Most people dropped to a walk after the first few dunes.

I took a quick break to take this photo. Mimi had been pulling me along and she was wondering why we were stopping.

The red circle marks the halfway point of the route. If you enlarge the pic, you might be able to see some people on the top of that hill. Very few of us made it out that far. This is a great photo of the open desert though.

Celebrating the New Year in Dhahran

Happy New Year! Even though I am in Saudi Arabia, I somehow drank myself totally stupid two nights in a row, first at a happy hour after work on Wednesday with a bunch of people from other KSA compounds and the second at a great party on New Year's Eve thrown by the South African contingent. I know I lost some brain cells over the weekend.

I learned at the Wednesday happy hour what raw white tastes like--that shit could be used to remove paint. Whew. You can cut it and cut it with soda and it is still basically moonshine right out of the still. It stings your nose if you get a whiff of it straight.

The local term for brown and white is siddiqi. People say things like "did you try the white sid?" I'm sure the American expats back in the '40's had something to do with the ironic fact that siddiqi means friend in Arabic.

Anyway, I seem to have hooked into a social circuit of sorts and have been invited back to that happy hour next month (she has them the last Wednesday of every month).

Some of my lovely new Brit friends invited me along to the South African party on New Year's Eve. I stopped at their house (the Brits' house) for a few glasses of champagne first. Yes, champagne! Val and Bob are quite the connoisseurs and make some excellent wine products. The champagne was dry and crisp and very bubbly--and served in lovely little champagne flutes.

The South African party was the best one yet--a DJ, lots of fun dance and club music, liquor literally flowing nonstop, plenty of decent food to nibble on. The South Africans hang out with the usual Commonwealth contingent but they also include Americans and the odd European or two. My head and stomach couldn't face any more sid experiments so I stuck with the red whine, which turned out to be quite good. But take that with a grain of salt--I stumbled home sometime around 2am absolutely hammered--after an hour or so it all probably would have tasted "good". I even danced--yes, I know, that simply does not compute for those of you that know me well, but hey, it seemed the thing to do at the time. At midnight, I kissed and was kissed by a bunch of people, half of whom I didn't even know. The Commonwealth contingent is a friendly bunch for sure.

The next day I managed to drag myself up and out of bed and make it to the hash at 2pm.

Wherever there is a group of expats or even former expats, there is usually a hash. I've heard of hashes but never attemped one before. The Dhahran Hash House Harriers (DH3) were going to the desert south of camp on Friday, New Year's Day. When I found out I could take the dogs, I made sure I got the info about where and when to meet.

We had a lovely time!

The run was a "live" run--we chased the hare over a trail he made up as he went. Up and over dunes, dodging bushes and soft sand pits. Harry was in utter heaven.

About half of the hash is spread out in front of us. Some people run, some walk and run (that would include me), and some just stroll along, taking as many shortcuts as possible. Those are electrical pylons in the distance; there is a large electrical power plant run off natural gas out there.

It was very windy and cold for the season, in the low 60s F. Mimi's ears are blowing back! You can see Harry turned back waiting for us. The hare is way off at the top of the dune in the distance.

Hashing is as much a social event as it is an actual run. Having food and drink at the end is typical. The orange cooler in the pic below is filled with homemade beer (I found out they make beer by fermenting things like O'Doul's which solves the hops problem). You can see that Harry is ready to help out with the cheese and smoked salmon at a moment's notice!

The random clothing is also part of the hash. The odder you dress, the better. Most clubs have an annual "Red Dress Hash"--including this one! Everyone, even the guys, runs the hash in a red dress. Some do it in heels as well! It's a spring event--I can't wait!

Once the sun went down, we built a fire and hung out drinking beer and watching the full moon rise over the dunes until about 7pm when we all got too cold and decided to head back home.


I can't play the "newbie" card for too many more months but I am still regularly asked how I'm settling in. I always tell the truth: I am Alice and I've gone down the rabbit hole! Potions to make me tall, the Red Queen and her chess game, mimsy borogroves and walruses by the sea--it's all here in some form or another. I thoroughly hate my motel 6 apartment but my job is amazing--and I'm meeting all sorts of interesting, amusing people and doing things that I would not have done back home.