Team Little Mermaid And The Rasa Rasa Hunt

Last Saturday saw members from different treasure hunt teams joining forces to take down the treasure hunt known as the Rasa-Rasa Food Hunt 2009! Ian lir Cel, Andoo, Tuff Teacher and us got together to brush up on our treasure-hunting skills as we still needed practise honing our ability to spot keywords for anagrams and the likes as well as figuring them out quickly.

Team Layton has already participated in three other treasure hunts before this, and admittedly there were times the questions had us stumped. The way the questions are phrased in a treasure hunt doesn't comply to standard puzzle questions, and wouldn't make sense if the answer isn't nearby to look out for.

So, join more hunts!

The one thing we never did like about any treasure hunt was the fact that they started at some God forsaken hour before the sun rises. Like having to wake up at 5.45am thereabouts so that we could reach the venue before 7am. For this hunt, we had some 140 teams meeting up at the National Science Centre car park.

Stickers were handed out during the briefing a couple of days back, to stick to the car.

And then we had to figure out a team name for ourselves.



Except that instead of calling ourselves Sea Slug Team, we decided on Team Little Mermaid. That is to say, we kept suggesting that team name like how Osaka said it while the others tried to think of a better name. Team members Little Mermaid, Sebastian, Flounder and Scuttle. The reason for such a team name? The Little Mermaid soundtrack was playing throughout the treasure hunt on repeat! In the end Little Mermaid caved in and put the team name as Team Little Mermaid after all, haha!

After a quick briefing of what we were suppose to do, it's time to flag off!

This treasure hunt had some unique (read: hi-tech) aspects we'd not come across in previous hunts. In our briefing we were told that it would be require GPS, or a mobile phone with map faciliites, or a road map, a digital camera, and at least one team member with a Maxis line.

The reason for the Maxis line? Maxis was promoting their new 301 Finder service, and so we had to use text 301 to look for six food places, an automated teller machine, and a police station. And not only to text the service for the places, we had to take photos at the places as suggested by the 301 Finder service and print out the photos for submission! We suspect that, as Maxis was one of the main sponsors for this event, we had to do this extra bit of resource-wasting work.

Texting them was a bit of a hassle. First we'd to text them, and they would reply with 3 places, and we had to reply them with a 1, 2 or 3 to get more details of a place...

Texts received are free of charge, hence the RM0. But the amount we spent on texting them for this?! Hmmm at least the photo of our phone showing the text looks good, heh.

So now we have a text leading us to House Of Fishball, we've to take a photo there, making sure our team number could be seen.

We borrowed Bunny's GPS and Junior's 'The Star Guide To Malaysian Street Food' to help us out, and the GPS came in handy in identifying streets quickly as for the first part of this treasure hunt, there was no tulips/road-by-road guide, rather, we were told which street to look out for what particular questions! Luckily we had the GPS to save time, otherwise we might have been looking for answers on the wrong streets!

After much figuring out what treasures we were required to buy for the hunt, running about Hartamas, Kota Damansara, Damansara Uptown, SS2, and Bangsar to solve our treasure hunt questions, solving food challenges in Jaya 33, we sprinted off to the final venue - Solaris Dutamas for the final food challenge!

Which involved one of us making the best roti canai in a group of three. Sebastian/Flounder/Scuttle came out tops!

Once the treasure hunt was over we had time off to rest up before the dinner and prize giving ceremony at night at 3K complex. Team Litte Mermaid snagged...

33rd place! Oh well at least we got a food hamper although we didn't get the cash prizes...

By the way, Little Mermaid was too shy to head up to collect the prize hamper, even though she was the only one who fit the role of Little Mermaid...

After that, Little Mermaid suggested that we all go to Snowflake in Subang Jaya for desserts. An interesting place. You order your dessert, then sit and wait at your table with...

...the Snowflake 'Beeping UFO'. You can click the photo for a closeup as to what's written on it. What it does is start beeping when your order's ready, so you don't have to wait in line for your desserts to be ready.

Yummy way to end the day!