Kembara ANSARA 2009

First hunt of 2009. First one for quite a while, actually - more than a month since the MENSA hunt. Not a great start to the year though. Turned out to be quite disastrous, both in terms of the hunting experience and our performance.

Same old story with the team - I have never yet hunted with the same team for two different hunts! Originally we had two of my colleagues joining us. They were both from MRSM, so together with me we fulfilled the criteria to get the special ANSARA prize for highest placed ex-MRSM team. But at the 11th hour the Missus couldn't make it, so we had another colleague joining us. So there we were, The MERCERnaries, confident of at the very least finishing as the best ex-MRSM team. OH how wrong we were. In the end, we finished with 60+ points, and the 15th team out of only 34 got 79 points. Shows how far off we were. WE WERE NOT EVEN CLASSIFIED!

On hindsight, what did us in was mainly two things - carelessness and poor time management. Two of the REALLY important things that one must avoid when treasure hunting - so no excuse, really. There were a few clues where I figured out the answer, but not the SPECIFIC answer. And there are no half-points in hunting - either you get it right or wrong. And we got it wrong. One example:

Right! So be it to notes.

I managed to figure out that "Right!" stands for "R", and "So be it" is "Amen", giving me "Ramen" which was the name of one of the restaurants in the sector, which I put down as the answer. However, I stupidly didn't follow through with the rest of the clue - "notes". On the same signboard, there was the name "Ramen Wang Sdn Bhd". Now "notes" can be to mean "wang" ("money" in Malay). Therefore, "Ramen Wang Sdn Bhd" is indeed the only correct answer.

There were at least a couple other clues where I did the same mistake of not reading through the clue properly, and was punished. Saying that, there were also a few clues where I really "tembak" the answers, as the answers I had only half-answered the clue, but somehow they turned out correct!

Time-management was the other big mistake. You can argue that poor time management and not reading the clue properly go hand-in-hand. Not deciphering the clue makes it harder to find the answer, which in turn means that you spend more time than neccessary at the sector looking for the answer. We really suffered in the latter stages of the hunt, rushing back to the finishing point, what with the massive traffic near One Utama on a Saturday afternoon. We didn't get the points for 5 of the last 7 clues, which with more time I'm sure I would've got most of those.

All in all, a frustrating hunt, but on the bright side, a HELLUVA lot of lessons learnt!