City Romp

Last Sunday, a group of us participated in the City Romp. The City Romp is like a treasure hunt/Amazing Race type game. We were given clues and had to find the answers while travelling all across the city. The whole event was to raise money for the Burnet Institute, who do research into diseases like measles, HIV, hepatitis, malaria and TB, cancer and arthritis. So it was some fun and also for a good cause.

Despite forecasts of rain, the Gods were on our side and turned out a glorious day for the event. Everyone gathered at Federation Square to start off the event. Over 7000 people were participating so it was very busy indeed. Rob "Millsy" Mills of Australian Idol "fame" was there hosting the event. He's seen everywhere that no one even bothered to go and take photos of him. Lately people can see him on "The Mint" (a crappy late night game show), Singing Bee (a crappy singing game show), The Chaser's War on Everything (a great satirical show) and popping up in gigs all over the city. My friend even saw him at a comedy event. He's definitely spreading himself around.

Here is my group, the "Scavengers". From left is Kakada, Thanh (yep, same name as guys and girls can be called Thanh), Waylin, Justin and Adrian. We were pumped and ready to go. We had our maps, number tags, compass, GPS, pen, mobile phone and water. We were going to run the best race we could.

Once Justin texted the word "GO", we were given our first clue and off we went. Our first stop was Myer. We didn't know quite what to look for at the start. Eventually we found that we had to look for these orange tables. We were then given a clue and had to try and find the answer. Our first clue was what change we would get from $50 after buying all these things in the Myer food court. So we went to the food court and got all the prices. However, we were tricked on our first question already because we forgot that since there are no longer 1 and 2 cents, prices get rounded down. Luckily, you get two tries at every question. We smsed our second answer and it was right.

After the first initial compulsory stop at Myer, we were free to choose our route. So we sat down at the Myer food court and marked out where every clue was. It was better to do some planning at the start we thought than rush off and have no plan. Like the old saying goes "If you fail to plan, then plan to fail". So being the clever cookies that we were, we marked out an entire route for the whole 4 hours that we had. So off we went through the city.

Here are some of the places we visited below. We visited 21 stops all up, but we also got lost quite a bit and had to go to different areas to find the answers, so all up we might have visited about 50 locations. Some of the clues were easy while others took quite a bit of searching to find the answer. It was all really fun at the start and I did feel like I was on the Amazing Race tv show. However, by the end of it, we were all so tired and hungry that we just wanted to finish.

So in time order, here are some of the places we got to see. I've lived in Melbourne nearly all my life but didn't know there were so many great places right in the city to visit, a lot of them free as well. I must go back to a lot of them and have a better look.

Chinatown Meseum

Justin texting in the answer. It worked for the first few questions, but after a while, the system must have got overloaded and the sms were not working. We resorted to handing in the answer on the paper provided. This wasted a bit of time as we would sometimes have to track back to the clue station to hand in the answer.

State Library

Melbourne Central

RMIT University

City Baths

Melbourne Uni

The iconic Melbourne Trams

City Square

King's Domain looking down at the Shrine of Rememberance

Police Meseum

The Police Meseum was our last stop for the day. It was a really fun day and full of surprises. There's so much stuff to see in Melbourne. I'm definitely going to go back to Federation Square to look at the free art displays on show. Currently, the Joseph Brown collection is on display. Also, the Melbourne Racing Club right next door also has a great history of racing in Victoria. The Australian Centre of Moving Images, ACMI currently have the Pixar animation on display. This race has shown me so many new places in Melbourne. Hopefully we might even have won something. Have to wait for the results.