The Anchorvale Amazing Race on 12th March 2016

It was a day like no other. It was to be a historic day for our young club. The very first Anchorvale Amazing Race had finally dawned upon us. 

It was a nice sunny afternoon. The Anchorvale Toastmasters were geared up at 2 PM in front of the UOB lobby at Compass Point. Everyone was eagerly looking forward to facing some captivating and clever challenges ahead for the next 3 hours. I was pleasantly surprised to find that we had 6 teams who had registered and many of our enthusiastic Toastmasters brought their family members or friends to contest in this family friendly race.

The teams that took part in the race were:

1) Valliappan, Muthu and his son

2) Kelvin and friends

3) Sathya and family

4) Ricky, Sridhar and his daughter, Vinay and his daughter

5) Riz and family

6) Hareesh and family.

The youngest participant was Sathiya’s cute little 3 year old Princess.

Zul briefed the teams about the instructions of the race and introduced the 6 Station Masters (Zul, Norman, Salma, Joseph Chong, Clement Chio (from Buona Vista Toastmasters) and Zhong Hao).

We had 2 awesome photographers Norman and Clement who captured the lovely moments during every stage of the race. Before we started off from Compass Point, we all took a fabulous Wefie.

Say Cheese

Our first task was in a pouch containing a Map of Sengkang and a Clue to find the first station. The teams were tasked to find an intersecting point between 4 religious sites, whereby X marks the spot. Most of the teams found their answer quickly and managed to get the next clue. The next clue was to proceed to destination X, which is a place that never sleeps.

We guessed that it could be SPC petrol station and rushed towards that. When we reached there, we could not see our station masters and were a bit disappointed. Muthu and I were quickly exploring all possible options at the neighbourhood which were available for 24 hours. Finally, we realised that the next destination was 7-11. When we went there, we saw that most of the teams were already proceeding to their next station. We knew we were late. However, we were motivated by Muthu’s 5-year-old son who co-operated very well to run with us in the scorching hot sun.

Our next task had a Chess board layout and instructions for the King and accompanying Chess pieces to move. The landing point of these Chess pieces would show where our next clue would be found. Unfortunately, we made judgements too intellectually and calculated the next clue to be 6 blocks away and started to walk far.  We were almost lost and couldn’t find the destination. Luckily, Zul gave us a clue to get us back on track. We took the next clue which had 4 photos of that location and we were tasked to find out Beige coloured envelopes at these locations. We managed to find the envelopes and got the answers to the quiz which were inside those covers. The answers to the quiz led to the next destination which was ‘Seletar Mall’. We were the last to leave for Seletar Mall.

The next task was to look for the loudest mouth of Anchorvale Toastmasters who was located at our childhood at Seletar Mall. It didn’t even take a second to realise that the loudest mouth we were looking for would be Salma. The clue was easy and we headed to the Play area at Seletar Mall and met Salma. The next task was to find some models in advertisements displayed at the shops and imitate those advertisements as we take a photo. It was really funny to loosen up and pose like crazy people in public.

The next task was to get 6 freebies (at least 2 food items and 2 cosmetic items) from the shops. We tried asking for sample cosmetic items from the shops and couldn’t get any. Then we consulted Salma and she said we can even apply some cosmetics (that are available for testing) on our body and bring back. And for the first time ever, we applied some lipsticks, mascara and face powder in our hands and collected some sample ice creams and went to collect our next clue from Salma. We continued to be the last team till here.

Then we had to go to a park near Thanggam LRT station to find the Hungry Prince. This turned out to be Jalan Kayu. The Hungry Prince was actually our Club President Zul. He gave us the next task which was interestingly a choice between 2 challenges. Firstly, we could choose to memorise the prata list from Thasevi menu and act it out for the other team-mate to guess or to remember shop names along Jalan Kayu and answer the questionnaire to test our memory. We chose to go for memorising the prata list as it was easy to guess out the prata names. Muthu was the actor and I guessed the names pretty easily, as I had been to Thasevi restaurant several times before. 

After that, we were given a puzzle to assemble to find the next destination. Every other team was stuck here and trying to figure out the puzzle. Muthu cracked the puzzle within minutes to guess that the next destination was Kampung Buangkok where we had to find 4 embossed markers which we would have to shade. This was the turning point of the Amazing race. The turtles started to inch ahead of the rest.

We were the first to reach Kampung Buangkok and managed to find 3 embossed markers very quickly. Unfortunately, the last marker was very difficult to find. Muthu took a step further to get into a house to enquire about the location shown in our clue. We guessed Norman purposely hung it at a different location from the other 3 markers. Finally, we managed to get it and head to Sengkang to meet the Legend and Giant Mangosteen which was located at Anchorvale CC.

At the open space in front of the Legends Cafe, we were the first to reach and had to complete 3 more entertaining tasks. Firstly, we had to walk a designated path on reflexology stones without our shoes with our legs tied together using raffia string. Then we had to play Frisbee and throw it amongst our team and catch it 20 times without dropping it. Finally, we had to do the most hilarious challenge of all. We were given a choice of famous dance songs to dance with and we chose to dance for Gangnam style. It was an exhilarating time dancing together in public with Muthu and his cute son who was fully supportive throughout our amazing race.

It was a truly thrilling and fun filled experience. And guess what, we emerged as the winners for this race.

After the race ended, everyone had a yummy dinner at the Mushroom Café, located at the Riverside Park.

We were amazed to see how efficiently our Anchorvale Toastmasters organised such a brilliant race. We were impressed to find that the organising team actually organized a trial the previous week to ensure that everything went smooth throughout our own journey. Special thanks to the participants of the trial run; Julie Mae, Rasu, Alvin, his wife and his son.

Kudos to the organising team for the efforts they had put in to make this race a wonderful experience that will be etched in our memories forever.

We were truly inspired by the qualities of the leadership team under the safe hands of Zul, Salma and Norman. Special thanks to Zhong Hao, Joseph Chong and Clement Chio for their invaluable support on the day of the race. 

Written By: Valliappan Selvamani