Written by: Lim Ming Yang
Date - 15th January 2011
Entry fee - RM300
Team members - Ming, Wern, Siva & Chuan Leng
CoC - Kheirul Nazib & Johan
The Putrajaya 2011 Hunt was an interesting hunt for me in many ways. It had challenges incorporated, and it was a motor hunt that hardly made use of the motors except to get from one hunting point to another. Furthermore, it was the first time hunting with two other hunters, and yet we had 4 familiar faces making up a 2nd team – The Meeples V1.1. It was really nice to be able to hunt amongst the company of friends, to turn and see a familiar face, motivation for each other I would assume.
Date - 15th January 2011
Entry fee - RM300
Team members - Ming, Wern, Siva & Chuan Leng
CoC - Kheirul Nazib & Johan
The Putrajaya 2011 Hunt was an interesting hunt for me in many ways. It had challenges incorporated, and it was a motor hunt that hardly made use of the motors except to get from one hunting point to another. Furthermore, it was the first time hunting with two other hunters, and yet we had 4 familiar faces making up a 2nd team – The Meeples V1.1. It was really nice to be able to hunt amongst the company of friends, to turn and see a familiar face, motivation for each other I would assume.
It was behind the same motivation I guess that The Meeples V1.1 actually ended up in front of us, at position 23, while we ended up 26th for this hunt. Wern had already mentioned many times the day before that she was sure the other team would do better than us, self fulfilling prophecy at hand?
The Hunt was divided into 3 main sections of 2 hours – cryptic at shops, challenges at parks, and lastly another 2 hours at Alamanda Putrajaya for cryptic hunting again! We actually thought we did the first - shops section quite well, submitting at 10am, prior to the cut off time although we did get one last answer immediately after submission, few seconds too late. Unfortunately, a few answers that we “thought” were fitting were actually bested by other alternatives, and we only got 6/15 Questions for this section, which is probably the worst performance we’ve turned in, in a long time.
Furthermore, with our self admitted – horrible knowledge of our local language – we were caught by Questions which required us to know things such as:
Bagaikan Aur Dengan Tebing
Rona = Warna
Iqra = Quran Reciter
What made it tough was also the fact that for the entire Putrajaya Hunt – 30 Qs in total, all were not in sequence, and the answers were located either on signboards, strollers, manholes on the floor, arcade machines, you name it. Because of the trend of answers being everywhere, we even went for “Passionate” at the Love – Test Meter Machine (20 cents a try only!) for the Question “Fruity Chinese Tea?”, taking ? as the anagram indicator, when the actual answer – Chamelon was BIG BIG in front of us, and I even remarked to Wern and said “Wow, look a business and they can’t even spell Chameleon properly!” Sigh!
Challenges at the park were pretty straightforward and simple. We had bought the map of Putrajaya earlier, and I had also studied the map prior to the hunt, so looking for the Parks were not much of a challenge, and we also had the excellent navigation/driving team pairing of Lim & Siva at the front. The only stumbling block for us came at the “Ulat Sagu”, which did happen to be the first park we reached. Once we feasted our eyes upon that tasty wiggling morsel, I knew that my Fear Factor challenges on previous hunts such as (i) looking for coins in a box of toads; and (ii) transferring worms from one container to another with the mouth, had been bested! Eating this? No way! After much debate with Wern, her rationale being it is a must do as all other teams will do, and mine being “Aiyah” we won’t get top few places so 5 pts won’t matter la.. not worth it, later eat already cannot hunt”, we abandoned the 5 pts.
Picture taken for one of the challenges
One interesting section for me was the Morrocan Plaza, where there were 5 questions to answer worth 1 point each, and every team managed to find 4/5 as they were just required to pull the info of the various information boards there. Kudos to the COC for sneakily putting in 1 cryptic question there – we had went round and round without getting the answer when I happened to suddenly see the cryptic side to the answer to get the place!
The last section was at Alamanda Putrajaya, another walk hunt within the mall, and this time we did better with the 15, although not much better with 8 correct! For treasures however, we did get 4 out of 5 which is a pretty good result =)
On overall it was a pretty good hunt, considering the various sections so that the hunters (260 teams) did not clash with each other, but perhaps the only gripe was during submission for both leg 1 and leg 2 – there was only one line for submission which resulted in a very long line and long wait times to submit. For the last part, we noticed that hunters were hunting even after the cut off time of 2pm at Alamanda, and when we called our team mates we found out that they were still in time and we could still hunt! We quickly got off our feet, continued hunting, and even managed to get one answer at around 2.20pm which could still be submitted!
I really hope we can get 2 teams of The Meeples, be it V1.1 or 1.2 to go on hunts, it is really lots of fun to see each other during the hunt itself =)
