21-July-2007
5.00am
The alarm clock went off and i got myself ready for the trip. Carol had told me that they would be picking me up at 5.30am, and so i waited in the living room at around 5.20am, without having any breakfast because i had forgotten to get anything for breakfast on the day before.
Then i received a call from Carol at around 5.25am. She said they had just left home because of getting up late. They would be picking up Siang first at Taman Daya, which means that there was still ample time for me to take breakfast. Mom then quickly cooked a bowl of instant noodles for me and this was the food that would last me for the next 6 hours.
6.40am
Arrived at Foon Yew High School Kulai and saw a lot of cars lining up at the parking lot already. We were actually the third last car to arrive. Sui's team was behind us.
7.00am
Group photo was taken and all teams were ready to go. The booklets were given to each team once all members of the team were in the car. We departed one after another in the order we arrived.
(I've scanned the booklet and will post it up tomorrow.)
7.15am to 4.00pm
I didn't keep track of the time during the race, so i'll just relate what happened without making reference to the time.
The first instruction said to head straight to Alor Gajah Toll Plaza. It was a long journey and took us more than an hour. During this long journey, we were supposed to solve the SMS questions. For each question, only the team that sms-ed the right answer first would get a prize. Out of the ten questions, we managed to answer 9, and later in the evening when the answers were revealed, we got to know that not all of our answers were correct.
On our way to Alor Gajah, as Carol they all hadn't taken their breakfast, we stopped at one of the rest areas (i can't recall where) for food. That kinda slowed us down a bit and put us behind other teams.
We wasted a bit of time again at the toll area because we thought that the answers to the first two questions were supposed to be found there. We couldn't find anything that seemed to match up with the clues and so we simply took some pictures randomly. It was only after we left the toll plaza and drove past a shop lot not far from the toll that we saw the answers.
Throughout the journey, i sms-ed more than half of the questions to 贝 at home and asked him to search for the answers from the Web. He would sms back whatever he could find online and that served as a guide for us to look for the answers at the designated area indicated on the map. I can't imagine how much our phone bill is gonna be for this month just for this treasure hunt.
Ok, before you call us cheaters, do know that there were participants who brought along laptops with remote Internet access. So what we did wasn't cheating but just being instrumental and resourceful.
After solving the first two clues near Alor Gajah Toll Plaza, the map took us to Tampin, a town located at the border of Melaka and Negeri Sembilan. The answers to Q3 to Q12 were to be found in this town.
To solve Q12, we gotta ask the locals for help. The answer was the name of a noodle shop that was very famous in that town. Since it was noon time already, we decided to have our lunch there at the noodle shop.
Sorry to say that all of us, even other participants who had their lunch there too, thought that there was nothing special about the noodles at all. We didn't think that it was delicious at all. We don't understand why it is so famous. Let's just say that perhaps JB people have very different taste from Tampin people.
Labels: travel
