MENSA Treasure Hunt 2008

We took part in the MENSA Malaysia Treasure Hunt 2008 on Sunday. It was yet another iteration of Team Teh Tarik, with our fourth different teammates in as many hunts. After the hunt though, it seems that we have finally got a permanent team!

Anyway, the hunt, organised by Laurence Hie, was themed "Planet Green". The questions were almost entirely environment-based, and every single treasure item also had something to do with conserving the environment, which included bringing in at least 20kgs of old newspapers before the flag-off!

This is our first hunt that's not organised by Time Out, and I have to admit that the clues, though fair, were easier than Time Out's. Some of the clues were solveable even before we reached the relevent sector! There were surpringly a lot of general knowledge clues, but thanks to my trusted iPhone and Iskandar's 3G-enabled MacBook Pro, we managed to Wiki our way through them. However, we were stumped by a couple of clues, as the answers were really really small(!) or we just didn't do enough research on the Wiki.

This was also the very first time we managed to get ALL the treasures! As we the final hunt sector was in the Mutiara Damansara/Damansara Perdana area, we all thought that we could easily get everything at Tesco Mutiara Damansara. How wrong were we. They didn't have the right brand of garbage bags, nor did they have the EXACT type of light bulb that was specified! So ala Amazing Race we sprinted next door to Ikano to try our luck at Ace Hardware and Cold Storage. We managed to get the correct brand of garbage bags, but still no light bulb. In the end, considering that at 8 points, each treasure was worth almost 3 whole clues (3 points), we decided to drive around to look for a specialist lighting store. We managed to find one in Uptown, and were we happy when we found the exact brand and type at the very first store!

We went back through some of the final sectors to search for some answers we missed, but in vain. We decided to cut our losses and since we had less than half an hour to the deadline, we decided to go back to the checkpoint at Sri KDU School. As we had a wee bit of time left when we got there and we weren't happy with our answers from the first sector, we dropped Nini off at the checkpoint with our answer sheet and treasures and headed to the sector again. With two minutes to spare, I had a hunch for one of the tie-breaker clues and called Nini to give her the answer. The answer turned out to be the correct one and it proved vital as we were tied on points with another team!

In the end we managed to finish among the prize-winners in a respectable 18th place, which out of 40-odd teams may not seem as a great achievement at first. However, considering the who's who of the Malaysian treasure hunting scene took part in the hunt (including Cornelius Koh who flew all the way from KK just for this!), we did feel rather proud of ourselves in only our 4th ever hunt (and the very FIRST hunt for Iskandar & Kamariah!). Indeed, the MENSA Hunt is regarded by many as one of the four "Grand Slams" of local treasure hunts, so you can see just how respectable our 18th place was.

As I said at the start of this post, we think that we finally finalised the lineup for Team Teh Tarik. Everyone did a very good job, and we are raring to go for our next hunt together, with high hopes of climbing swiftly up the rankings. Watch this space!

More details of the MENSA Treasure Hunt 2008 can be found at Michael Pang's site.