Atmah Treasure Hunt, and how it scrambled my brain. (Part I)

I’m back from the Atmah Charity Treasure Hunt.

Saturday was the actual Treasure Hunt day, that started in the morning from Sunway to the evening in Simpang Pulai.

Within that 10 hours of hunting, I can summarize the whole thing into a simple equation:

”IQ is a exponentially inverse function of time”

Why? The answer lies in the following graph……

I tell you, treasure hunting is no easy business.

Now I actually have doubts about my intelligence…and even as I type this, I have half the confidence that I thought I used to have.

For those who are not familiar with motor treasure hunts, here’s a summary for you:

Participants travel from the start point and find answers along the way until the destination. You are given 2 things : Tulips and Questions. Tulips will help you navigate your way, bring you through the exact turns and of course, locations of the answers. Based on your interpretations of the questions, your answers are in the form of words / phrases / names which can be located on signboards, building names, posts.

For those who are familiar with motor treasure hunts, you will understand when we say that we are first timers…that our final score was 12/100.

SERIOUS DAMN HARD THE QUESTIONS! omgwtfknnccb.

The morning started at 7am sharp at the carpark of Monash Uni, Sunway..and there were 100 teams participating. Not a bad number, considering that there were only 60 teams in 2009’s treasure hunt.

Pimpin my ride with @Andygts.

YB Hannah Yeoh took part in the flag-off as well. She made it clear that treasure hunts weren’t really her thing, cos apparently she hates looking for things. Haha. I was surprised that she tweeted me back when I twitpic her! Follow her at @hannahyeoh if you will

Team spirit points for @Jasontkb and the Super gang!

It was quite a good feeling to be part of a 100 car convoy, except you know that the car next to you is waiting to pwn your face in competition. Every location given by the tulips were positively packed with treasure hunt cars. Once you see cars stopping by, you’ll know there are answers.

Even if it was obvious that there weren’t any answers, once we spotted cars at one place, we stopped also. Kiasu + n00b mah.

Girls working hard…

And girls hardly working… @meiyingt and @claudiasibert bersembang kat bawah pokok. ish.

This is how navigation looks like..more or less.

Let me tell you how we answer the treasure hunt questions, with one quick example.

Read this question for 5 minutes, then notice how your brain starts shrinking to the size of a tennis ball. That’s exactly how I felt when I read the question. I had ‘WTF’ printed all over my mind trying to answer it.

There’s something in Treasure Hunts called ‘anagrams’ that we failed to understand and use. Anagrams are the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase. Instead, we read the question literally and tried to answer it…well…literally.

This is how we did it:  We started by looking through the names of each shop and pairing it with ‘Henry Curious’ to see which made sense. Obviously, we got nowhere. haha..!

This was the closest that we had, and we decided, this must be the answer:

‘Henry is Curious? So Ah Tan Say Hoe (How) loh!!’

-________-

Now you know why we got only 12 / 100 points.

Cheers!
EVo

(to be continued in Part II…)

…or read my previous post on the treasure hunt.

Update : Check out @gladyslcp’s post on the treasure hunt here.

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