The Treasure Hunt Reviewed....

On Sunday, together with three friends, I took part in the 12th NBT Treasure Hunt. It was flagged off and finished at the International Convention Centre. Almost 200 teams participated this year. The theme for this year was Safari. It was my fourth time taking part; while it was the sixth time for a friend and the second time for the other two.

The hunt was divided into a few legs. The first leg consisted of taking picture where one of us had to pose as a member of a tribe on a hunt, the second one posed as an animal being hunted and the other two were free to pose anything they liked. We were sent away to Taman Peranginan Tasik, right in the middle of Bandar Seri Begawan. For this task, we had to use props, so we went back to a friend's house to gather our props. We spent quite a lot of time, gathering our props and practising our pose; I thought it was quite unnecessary to spend almost an hour doing so. Another challenge followed after that at Tasik, before we proceded to Tungku Beach for another challenge, which turned out to be a task to gather rubbish from the beach. We still had some of the props that we used for the earlier challenge, so we dumped them into our bin bag, while we cheated a bit by crumpling pieces to newspaper to give it some volume.

From Tungku Beach we returned to ICC to collect the clues to answers that we needed to find from the many signboards along the allocated route. There were 25 questions to be answered and the questions took us along Jalan Berakas (towards Lambak Kanan), Jalan Pasir Berakas, the Batu Bersurat shopping area, Kg. Mata-mata, Jalan Gadong, Jalan Tutong, Seri Complex area and Jalan Muara. All the route, there were two more challenges which took us out of our car. One challenge was to identify the different animals from pictures and another was to count the number of living things on a piece of card in 20 seconds.

We were also asked to bring back three treasures which we had to work out from a set of clues. When all the questions were answered and the treasures were obtained, we returned to the ICC to hand in our answers and our treasures. At the ICC, we had another challenge where we had to identify the animals from the sound that they made.

The result came out almost three hours later. While waiting for the result, there were some games for the kids and a performance from the winner of the first series of Passport to Fame (P2F) reality television programme. After his performance, Zul F was announced as the Ambassador of Vios Brunei and he was also given a brand new Toyota Vios. Coincidentally, the winner of the second series of P2F which will begin soon will also receive a brand new Toyota Vios.

Our team number of 10, so we gave ourselves a cryptic name, X-cellent. That X was supposed to denote the Roman numeral for 10. From the 25 questions given, we got 24 out of 25 correct. We also brought the correct treasures. We were quite happy with this. However, the same could not be said for the challenges. For the photography challenge, we might have lost some marks in the creativity area. We also lost some points in another challenge at the Tasik. For the Eye Sore challenge, where we had to identify the animals from the pictures provided, we got 5 out of 10 correct. We answered ostrich for emu, bat for flying fox, wild hog for camel, antelope for impala and something else that I had forgotten. We were shown the picture of the head of an emu, but apparently you could differentiate an emu from an ostrich from the orientation of the hair on top of the head; a flying fox from a bat from the size of their ears, and an impala from an antelope from the twist on its horns. We could not even tell how the hooves of a camel would look like! How were supposed to know these things? None of us actually studied zoology and we were not exactly veterinarians. And the last time that we went to the zoo was probably when we were small kids. So how were we supposed to tell the differences from these animals? We also got some of the animal calls wrong.

We were quietly confident that we did rather well in the hunt. We could imagine our disappointment to be announced the eighth-placed winner. We scored a total of 142, from a possible 155. The competition was apparently quite tough this year. The final positions were perhaps determined by the challenges. I knew some teams who did well in the questions and treasure parts, but still came in lowly places. Lots of points were probably dropped in the challenges. There was only a difference of 7 points between the tenth-placed winner and the runner-up. Many teams were actually tied in the points.

I spoke to some people and mostly they felt that the Treasure Hunt should not have too many challenges. The hunt should have more questions and the questions need to be made more difficult. The general view was that the questions were too easy and that was probably the reason why many teams did well in the questions part, only to be beaten in the challenges.