Cogito ergo scribo

I'm so tired today. After the Treasure Hunt trip to Kuantan and the long drive back (although 贝 was the one who drove), i was too tired to update my blog yesterday. I did bring my laptop along to Kuantan but not the 3G data card so i couldn't access the Internet. Well, i was so dead beat that i couldn't write anything anyway.

The Treasure Hunt was organized by the Foon Yew Scout Alumni and over 50 cars participated (with 3 to 5 persons per car). For this year, Sui's company was one of the sponsors so the journey started from Desa Tebrau in JB and travelled all the way to Cherating Bay Resort in Kuantan. Each team was given a booklet that consists of the route directions and clues (i'll scan it and put it up in tomorrow's post). We had to solve the clues en route and must arrive at the pit stop in Kuantan within 9 hours. There was a late penalty of 5 points for every 10 minutes of delay. We were to take the pictures of the answers with a digital camera and one of the team mates must be in the picture showing the question number. We must also write down our answers in an answer sheet and submit together with the memory card. According to the organizer, the purpose of taking the photos was to prevent any "collaboration between teams" (i.e. cheating) that had happened in previous years.



There were four persons in our team -- Carol and her husband KT, and 贝 and myself. 贝 was the driver, i was the navigator and "model" in the pictures, Carol was the "secretary" in keeping track of the mileage and writing down the answers, and KT was the photographer. Sui was in another team of four with her colleagues. They had walkie-talkie as their communication tool so they could split up the teams to look for answers at the same time. Smart girl!

I'll now chronicle our exciting journey to the east coast and hopefully my memory can still serve me well. Because of the tight time line, i didn't have the time to stop and snap pictures while i was playing the game. I could only take the photos after the game and on our way back to JB (which will be in my next post). All time stated below are just estimation as i didn't keep track of the details such as what time did i arrive at where... hey, i must have my full concentration on the game ok!

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15-July-2005 (the night before the Treasure Hunt)

Went to bed at around 10.45pm after blogging my last post. 贝 has barely recovered from his flu and i again told him that it would be ok if he couldn't make it the next day. He re-assured me that he was feeling fine already.

贝 and i actually agreed earlier that we should go to bed latest by 10.30pm because we gotta wake up really early the next day. However, maybe due to our excessive afternoon nap, we didn't feel sleepy at all. I think we probably fell asleep around 11.30pm.


16-July-2005

5.15am

Awaken by the alarm clock and dragged myself out of the bed. Washed up and made sandwiches to be brought along to the trip.

5.45am

Left home and headed towards the starting point at Desa Tebrau, which was 30 minute drive from my home.

6.15am

Arrived at Desa Tebrau and saw that there were about 20 cars lined up already at the starting line. 贝 and i stuck our car number onto the car doors. Our lucky number: 29.


6.30am

Drove our car to join the queuing line. Other teams arrived gradually. Waited.


6.40am

Our team mates arrived. More teams arrived. Still waiting.


7.00am

Group photo taken by the organizer. All teams got on the car and ready to go.

7.15am

The treasure hunt began with a wave of the flag by the organizer. One particular team, Car No. 2, was so kiasu that they just drove off immediately but only to be stopped by the crew. All the cars were already lined up based on our order of arrival and teams were supposed to depart in sequence. According to the booklet, this team had three winning streak but lost their championship to another team the year before. They aimed to re-claim their championship this time and maybe that explains their over-eagerness.

After Car No. 2 was back in line, the cars drove off one after another. The booklets were given to us only at the starting point so we've not had the chance to read the directions yet and not sure where to turn. We did what other teams were doing too -- followed the car in front and stopped at where we saw the most people. The first 4 questions were just within 2km of distance. It wasn't too hard to solve the clues partly because the questions were quite easy, and also there were many other teams around that area too. However, we were not too sure on the answer to Q.3; there were two shops with Japanese names and we couldn't decide which one should be the answer. In the end we shot both and decided to discuss later.

7.35am

Left for the next destination: Kota Tinggi, about 27km away.

贝 called his sister and Carol called hers, who both know Japanese, to check out the Japanese words for Q.3. Both couldn't give us a definite answer.

8.00am

Arrived at Kota Tinggi Town. Q.5 to Q. 10 were to be answered here.

We were unsure of two questions here (Q.5 and Q.8) but decided not to waste too much time so we just took pictures of the closest answers we could get and proceed on with our journey. We got a bit lost following the directions and gotta turned back to where Q.7 was located. We lost a bit of time here and was wondering if we were already behind most of the teams.

8.45am

Left for the next destination: Mersing town, about 89km away.

The roads were narrow (single lane) and winding with many lorries. A few cars overtook us and they were driving so fast that we were really concerned about their safety. Hey, it's just a game. We knew that time management was very important in this game but we should still drive carefully, especially on these kind of winding roads. Fortunately nothing unfortunate happened.


There wasn't any petrol station for the whole journey towards Mersing. 贝 and i were desperately looking for one, not because our car was running out of gas, but our bladders couldn't take it anymore and we really needed to pee. We stopped at the very first petrol station we saw, which was not far from Mersing town center.

Carol told us that the store beside the petrol station sells very tasty biscuits and we decided to get some the next day on our way back.

10.00am

Arrived at Mersing town. Q. 11 to Q.17 were to be answered here.

We took the wrong turn at the roundabout and wasted some time looking for the wrong answers. Luckily we discovered our mistakes and quickly catch up with other teams. One tactic we employed was to ask the local people for help in solving the clues since they know their town the best. This helped us a lot in finding the answers.

11.15am

Left for the next destination: Pekan, about 148km away.

Since this was a very long drive, we must report to a check point to receive the bonus questions for the teams to discuss along the way. The answers were to be sent by SMS and only a few teams would be awarded with the bonus points.

The journey was again with narrow winding roads and many heavy vehicles. The area was quite remote that the scenery was just trees, plantations, kambing, lembu, and decomposed bodies of some unrecognizable dead animals. There was no mobile signal most of the time and we couldn't send out our answers until about 45 minutes later. I made used of 贝's Blackberry to google the Japanese words for Q.3 and other questions in advance. Finally we decided on the answer for Q.3 based on the result i found from the Web. Hey, cheating through GPRS... how i love technology!


Along the way, we saw very few cars of other teams and were really wondering if we were far ahead or very much behind.

12.50pm

Arrived at Pekan. Q. 18 to Q.23 were to be answered here.

It started to shower. The answers were located at a single street and we managed to complete the search very fast (or so we thought). We thought that since Kuantan town is not far from Pekan and we were only left with 7 questions, we would just proceed on and get it done quickly before having lunch. This proved to be a wrong decision later on.

1.15pm

Left for the next destination: Kuantan town, about 50km away.

The rain didn't become heavier but the weather was still bad.

1.40pm

Arrived at Kuantan Town. Q. 24 to Q.30 were to be answered here.

The answers were located along two main street, Jalan Mahkota and Jalan Besar. These were very long streets with many shops and heavy traffic. It was still drizzling non-stop and this somehow dampened our enthusiasm. In addition to that, we started to feel hungry and tired after walking down the long long streets. We found the last 7 questions to be so difficult because there were simply too many shops along the streets. For a team that was draining out of energy, it was hard to keep our eyes on every details.

3.50pm

We should still have another 30 minutes more to explore but we were simply so exhausted and famish that we couldn't go on anymore. We headed for the pit stop and handed in our answers. We saw that we were the top 10 teams to submit the answers first.


We went to the nearest Chinese kopitiam, which was just opposite the pit stop, intended to have our late lunch there but it was packed with other teams. We walked further and realized that other Chinese kopitiam was already closed, so we had our lunch at a Malay kopitiam instead. The food there were just so-so but expensive. A plate of mee goreng cost RM4.50. I've always thought JB was the town with the highest standard of living. I guess i was wrong.

4.30pm

We left Kuantan town and headed for Cherating Bay resort, the place where we would be spending our nights. On our way there, we talked about how we've done and the two guys were so convinced that we should have not more than 5 questions wrong. They were to be unpleasantly surprised later in the night.

5.00pm

Arrived at Cherating Bay resort and the rain had stopped. After we've checked in and rested for a while, we went to the beach and finally could relax and enjoy the breeze.

8.00pm

Dinner at the resort with all the other teams. Everyone was so excited even though the dinner wasn't good. The so-called buffet dinner only had two dishes with plain rice. The food also ran out very fast. Initially we thought it was the resort that was not replenishing the food, but later we got to know that it was partly because of people wasting the food, i.e. some took too much and didn't eat while others didn't have enough.

9.00pm

Everyone was gathered in a conference room for the announcement of the results. The host told us that many teams scored very high points and the results were very closed. The answers were then revealed and we had 10 wrong answers! This means we only scored 66.67%.

There were 20 prizes in total and needless to say, our pathetic result didn't win us anything. Sui's team won the consolation prize. We got to know later that the champion scored about 80%, so we really performed quite badly...

(One thing to note: Car No. 2 won the third prize. They didn't manage to reclaim their championship despite their enthusiasm)

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This is a very brief and boring narration of what happened during our treasure hunt (hmmm... why was it called treasure hunt when there wasn't any treasure to be hunted?). I couldn't provide more details because we were crazy searching for the answers and had no time for other things. Hopefully i'll have a more interesting post tomorrow with more pictures and my observations of some interesting things in Kuantan on my way home.

Labels: travel