Thursday 29 November:

There’s nothing like having to work for your lunch! Lloyd, Ryno, Niel and I (Gill) arrive at work all chipper because it’s almost Friday, the sun is shining and we know that today is loaf day (although we thoroughly enjoy working hard). We were told that today we would be having our Kreatif Krismas lunch. What we weren’t told was that we had to earn it!

So at 10am Kristoph pipes up that its time to leave for lunch BUT he is not going to tell us where we will be lunching! “Your first clue will be found at one of our client’s offices, Omnisol”. There was one rule: If we phoned Kristoph and Retha for directions, we would owe them a bottle of wine for helping us. Kristoph gives us fifty bucks for petrol and says good luck with an evil grin because he knows that he will be knocking back the first glass of wine in about 30 minutes while we run around the city…

So we all pile into my silver bullet (Corsa Lite – the lite side of life) and off we go to find Omnisol in Plattekloof with some tunes pumping the windows down and Ryno, our navigator with the map – all very exciting!

Will very little effort we find Omnisol (Well done, Ryno) and we get our first clue, further instructions and an envelope for each person. The heading of the individual letters is “RynoVSLloydVSNielVSGill” with 4 questions each relating to one of our jobs – a competition! After much deliberation we decide to work together to answer all the questions correctly and split that prize. After all, we at Kreatif pride ourselves on working together as a team (I think that scored serious brownie points with the bosses) . Along with that we got a piece of wood (huh) and a map to the next destination. Ryno immediately recognised the Exquisite Ice map (he should – he designed it) and we raced off to Riebeeck st in the city not forgetting to send an MMS of ourselves at Omnisol to Retha.

Once at Exquisite Ice Ryno and Lloyd jumped out while Niel and I circled the block. There Jacqui Rens gave us our next envelop with instructions and a key

- Go to the Waterfront Clocktower Tourism Centre and pick up flyers from three Kreatif Clients and then walk to the post office in the centre and get the post. Our next clue would be found there!

We quickly found the flyers, took another MMS and set off to the post office inside the V&A Waterfront to find the next clue.

At the post office we emptied the post box and found the last envelope. Our final clue will be found at http://treasureafrica.com/treasurehunt.

Niel cleverly remembered where we could find an internet cafe and we missioned off in that direction. Click the link to see what we found!

So it was time to put all the clues together to find the destination where we would be treated:

1. We received something at Omnisol…. WOOD

2. Leaving the Clock Tower you crossed a…. BRIDGE

3. What we found at the link… a picture of an ISLAND

WOODBRIDGE ISLAND! Whoo hoo, we had figured it out.

By this time it’s about 1pm, we are quite hungry and really ready to ring up the company bill but to our dismay my car was parked near the Clock Tower and the bridge linking us from the Waterfront to the Clock Tower had mysteriously broken.

Needless to say we sat in the blistering sun for about 45 minutes waiting for them to fix the bridge, dehydrating and insanely jealous that Kristoph and Retha were about to move onto there second bottle of wine!

We finally arrived at Maestro’s and were treated to a glorious meal and great company.

It really was a great experience. It’s rare to find a company like Kreatif, where so much effort was put into ensuring that we had a good Christmas Party. The treasure hunt was a fabulous way to build team spirit and get us working together and it was just plain old fun!

I would seriously encourage all our clients to consider doing something like this. If you look after you staff, they in turn will look after your company. It works for us.