KK City Tourism Treasure Hunt 2013

It's been a while since I last hunted in a treasure hunt, but today Vivian Cham, Claire Andrew, Chirsty Kong and I, hunted as Team Megapawns in the KK City Tourism Treasure Hunt. Many of the readers of this blog are aware that I no longer spend a lot of time hunting these days as much as I run marathons and ultra marathons. Nevertheless, the love of the game is still very much alive.

For the benefits of the new visitors to this blog, let me say that I have been spending a lot of time on treasure hunting in the past. I even went to the extent of flying to KL to join hunts over the weekends. I would then report in this blog and then analyse hunt questions. I was known to be "passionate" in the way I discuss and dissect hunt questions, and my criticisms have for the most part been brutal to say the least! This, however, did not accord well with some of my fellow Clerks-of-Coure (CoCs) from the West, and I had a shrewd suspicion that some of them even hated my guts for it!

I am basically trying to shy away from treasure hunting, but I sometimes find it hard to resist analysing hunt questions. I have been trying to access the Treasure Hunt Society's site to have a peak at their questions so that I could "secretly" analyse them for my personal enrichment, but I have not quite figured out how to do it! I'm not sure if there is something to do with keying in passwords etc, but maybe it's a blessing in disguise because I know I'm bound to find many, many mistakes by the CoCs!

This year, as in previous years, there were some very strong Master Hunter teams from West Malaysia coming to our shores, and I'm convinced that the CoC designed his questions taking into account of their presence. I believe this has resulted in an extremely tough hunt for the local hunters. But then again, the way I see it, it doesn't really matter if it's a tough or easy hunt, as long as it's a level playing field.

The hunt this year started and ended in Sutera Harbour. The hunt was supposed to cover a distance of approximately 80km according to the CoC, but of course the actual hunt distance of 160km is probably closer to the mark. Time control was 6 hours 30 mins, which I think is not enough, considering the amount of chores, challenges/games, as well as the hunt distance including the traffic jams in the City on a Sunday. Not to mention some so-called "bolded" questions which were not actually intended to be solved. But I will touch a bit on some questions later.

The first thing I did upon flag off was to quickly get my team organised in terms of delegation of duties. Claire and Christy were to handle the games and challenges, as I have learned from past KK City Tourism Hunts that those were mainly dependent on luck, and not so much on skill—meaning to say I did not think that I could do any better than Claire and Christy if I were to handle the games instead. My time would be better utilised to tackle some of the route questions. We had to split the duties because it was obvious to me from the beginning that time would be our biggest enemy! It was unfortunate that the format of the hunt was such that I had to split the teams a few times, but it was totally necessary; the mission was to try to win. After all that is the true meaning of teamwork—you try to give a job to each member in something that he or she is good at. But actually, it would be good if they too can handle more route questions as they need to train themselves in that area too. But that option was not available in this hunt.

I was happy to find that the treasure questions were quite easy  and fast to solve this year. We merely took a few minutes to solve all of them. But one of them was rejected in the end, as we lacked the skill of mind-reading. Of course our solution was a perfect fit for the clue, and it was a bad call for the CoC to reject our submission. I will discuss this interesting clue later in a separate post.

I'm glad that we were able to solve some of the bolded questions, but some were never intended to be solved anyway. We spent the amount of time that these bolded questions deserved, of course, but very soon I saw them for what they're worth; they're there in the question sheets to make the numbers, and I decided to abandon them after randomly choosing signboards to fill in the blanks.

There was another question in the Suria Mall sector which raised my blood pressure a few notches, and it took me quite a while to figure it out. I had to run back from DBKK office to Suria Mall to find the answer which was later rejected for an inferior one by the CoC. Again, I will discuss this further in a separate post.

Well, in the end we were late for the final submission and incurred several points' penalty. Knowing that there're a fair number of strong teams in the fray, it all seemed gloomy for us to even break into the top 10 positions. When the winners were announced one by one, we were excited because we sort of had some idea what's our score. We reckoned that we should at least manage to sneak into the top 20 positions. But then as the prize giving progressed, we began to worry again. We got to the last 10 top winners and we were still not called. Then 9th, and 8th, and 7th and 6th! I was sweating bullets and I thought I was about to faint. There was a short pause before they continued announcing the winners. 5th... 4th... still nothing. We knew by then that we had counted our scores wrongly. It seemed clear that we did not even make the cut for the top 30 winners!

Then came the shock of the day—our team was announced as the winner of 3rd place. I had no idea how that happened, but I wasn't complaining!

I wish to congratulate my team members, Vivian Cham, Claire Andrew and Christy Kong for a job well done. I couldn't have done it without them; they have all contributed and went through all the pains and efforts to secure the 3rd place finish. 

Now how about we try to hunt for the 2nd place next year!