My very first treasure hunt!

I've always wanted to join a treasure hunt. And no, I'm not talking about real treasure here, the kind associated with pirates and Indiana Jones. But rather, the more urban type of hunt where teams drive around "hunting" for answers to riddles in a set amount of time. It's become a popular pastime here in KL, where even "professional" teams of hunters exist. I've had experience with a "walk-hunt", and also entered the The Sun hunt a few times (even managing to win myself RM100!), but when the opportunity arose, I made the leap to enter my first ever PROPER treasure hunt.

So there we were - me, the missus and another couple - at the flag-off point somewhere in the USJ area at SEVEN in the morning. The hunt's organised by Lexis Nexis and the KL Bar and unfortunately for us, there wasn't any separate Masters category - so it was a baptism of fire for us as we had to compete with the "professionals".

For those of you who haven't joined these hunts before, the questions are mostly "cryptic". The hard part really is to decipher the questions. Once you have (sort of) figured out what the question wants, it's then just a matter of looking out for the answer amongst the multitude of shop signs along the specified route. As an example, the first question that was asked was as follows:

Some trial with its logics revolutionized.

Some of you may be thinking "huh?????". Well this a typical cryptic clue, and you need to know what words to look out for to solve it. There are actually 2 parts for the answer here:

1. "Some" is a partial indicator, which means that a portion of the next word forms the answer. The next word is "trial", so the answer could contain "TR" or "IAL" or even "AL".
2. "Revolutionized" in the question is an anagram indicator, which says that the answer is made up of the jumbled up letters of other words in the question. In this case, "its logics" is the anagram.

Once you've deciphered the question, it's then up to everyone to stare at all the shop signs looking for a name or phrase that fits the question. Lo and behold, the answer was:

IAL LOGISTICS (MALAYSIA) SDN BHD

See how the answer fits the question? "IAL" is part of "trial", and "LOGISTICS" is an anagram of "its logics".

So actually, a LOT of thinking has to be done on the day. Worse still if you have NO IDEA on what the question means, and you end up trying to scrutinize EVERY single shop sign to see if it fits the question in some way!

So how did we do? Well, we got 30 answers out of 40 correct, but didn't get any of the four required "treasures" - more on the treasures in a future post. Including some bonus points, we had a grand total of 95 points. There were prizes for the top 30 out of a total 60+ teams. And guess what? Even the team that finished in 30th place got more points than us!! BOTTOM HALF!! All that effort for nothing!

Well, this is just a start, and there are a few more hunts on the horizon. For the next ones, hoping to enter a Mercer team with the name "The MERCERnaries". Hopefully some luck from our 5-year winning streak in the annual Actuarial Society of Malaysia quiz would rub off!