MAH Hunt: 3-in-1

From left to right: Me, Vincent, KK Chai & Margaret.

It was my first open hunt in West Malaysia. As mentioned earlier, I was lucky enough to be given an opportunity to ride with the grandmasters. The hunt brought us from Kuala Lumpur to the historic town of Melaka.

I thought it was an interesting format — it was divided into 3 legs:

Leg 1 was the normal motorised hunt out from KL. Shortly after 8 am, teams were flagged off. Time control was 4 hours 30 minutes, ending up in Guoman Hotel. There were 30 route questions and 2 treasures to solve. There were also 3 Majlis Keselamatan Jalan Raya questions which carried no points, although failure to answer would result in score penalty. In between, teams had to stop in a dragon fruit farm for Mission 1: Slaying the "Dragon" Experience. The challenge was not complicated, it was mainly about eating dragon fruits cut into halves without using any utensils or hands to dig the flesh out, and eating it without damaging the skin.

We were the first to arrive at the pit stop of Leg 1 with a good 20 minutes before the station was opened. We waited anxiously for the arrival of the Clerk-of-Course. After we clocked in, we waited a while longer before the second team arrived. A fair number of teams got into bad traffic and arrived later, thus incurring time penalties.

Everyone had to wait a while longer before the VIPs arrived — as normally is the case — and then after some speeches, we had a sumptuous lunch.

Leg 2 was quite something. Thanks to the late arrival of the VIPs during the end of Leg 1, I suppose the time frame for Leg 2 had to be trimmed down a bit. The result was a formula 1 race from Guoman Hotel to the Bayview Hotel in Melaka within 1 hour 30 minutes. Of course Datuk Ramesh had no problem whatsoever. It's just too bad that his car had no wings. I'm sure at the speed he was driving, his car would have easily (literally) flown all the way to Melaka.

During the journey from Guoman Hotel to Bayview Hotel, teams had to find 15 hotel names hidden in a letter grid. Ordinarily, such task is no big deal, but doing it in a car travelling at high speed and with full stomach is quite a different matter.

Oddly, however, my team had no sense of urgency throughout that Leg 2. We travelled at average speed, and only realised the timeframe when it was almost too late. Nonetheless, we arrived at the Bayview Hotel with 1 minute to spare. When we arrived there, many other teams were already there, and we hardly even realised that they had overtaken us.

Leg 3 was the walk hunt. There were 20 questions to answer. The night before, I was told that it's going to be a 2-kilometre walk, but it turned out to be much more than that! It was quite fun walking the streets of Melaka, but we were all drenched in sweat; it was quite some walk!

About half way through, we had to buy a key-chain from someone, but that was not meant to be a difficult mission. When we finally arrived at the hotel again, we had some more minutes to spare. Uncle Chong Foo Seong was there in the hotel lobby. He was panting and obviously had a very, very good exercise. His team members somehow gave him some wrong instructions and he ended up going for a wild goose chase in the wrong street!

Later on when Ramesh and Kong Yew arrived at the hotel, I couldn't help overhearing their debate about the interpretations of "go ahead" and "go straight". Someone was saying, "When I said 'Go straight', I meant 'You go ahead first lah', I didn't mean go straight into that street!"

Well, overall, it was an interesting hunt. I didn't think it was a tough hunt. In fact, I would have been happier if it was a little bit tougher. I thought some of the questions could use some improvements, but I will discuss that in detail in another thread.

After the final submission of answers, we walked all the way back to Jonker Street again for Ais Kacang, and then took a cab back to the hotel. Later that evening, we had another sumptuous meal. We sat together with Kong Yew and Kok Seng. There were only 5 of us at our table, so you can imagine how much food went to waste; it was an 8-course dinner!

It was nice to get to know Kong Yew and Kok Seng. They were also kind enough to teach me some Tamil words. Imagine how knowledgeable some people are!

Soon, it was time for the question & answer presentation. From the beginning of the hunt, I was only keeping track on 3 teams, namely, Hunters "R" Us (which I tumpang), the Penang masters, and Uncle Chong's team. I didn't think there was any threat from other teams. So realistically speaking, there were only 3 teams competing that day. I say this because for some strange reasons, only the top 3 teams were eligible for prizes in the open category. Well, we came in third, which meant last place of the three competing teams at the top. It was quite a painful way to lose because all of us got the same score, i.e. 323 points. Yet we were the team which made the first mistake, so we lost the tie. But I will elaborate on this again later in another thread.

It was such an exhausting hunt, yet it was very satisfying. If only it was a little tougher, then it would have been perfect! Riding with the grandmasters was just awesome. I watched in silent admiration. They worked very efficiently; they worked very quick and hardly wasted any time — so much so that even toilet breaks might also be sacrificed, unless if it's really necessary!