Pair on global hunt

An adventurous streak in two former Matamata residents pushed them to sign up for the 2012 Global Scavenger Hunt which they have been selected to compete in, much to their delight.

In a competition similar to the Amazing Race, 20 two- person teams from around the world will battle it out to be named the ‘‘ world’s greatest travellers’’ between April 15 and May 5, 2012.

Saskia van Waaijenburg and her partner Andrew Parsonage – who have been a couple since high school in Matamata – decided to apply for the adventure so they could spend more time travelling together.

‘‘Andrew works as an investment banker in Auckland and I’m a history teacher, so we rarely get to spend quality time together away from it all. We liked the idea of not knowing where we would be travelling to and the idea of turning up at an airport of a place and having to rely on each other to get the tasks done appeals to us,’’ Ms van Waaijenburg said.

The Global Scavenger Hunt locations are kept secret until four hours before the race but in past hunts, teams have travelled around 40,000km, starting in a United States west coast city and heading west over oceans and continents to finish on the US east coast. The 2011 event started in Los Angeles and ended in New York City but contestants had gone via South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, India, Turkey, Spain, Morocco and Portugal.

It is designed participants’ overall

to test travel IQ, including such things as overcoming language barriers, inter- cultural competence and logistic challenges.

The couple said they had never done anything like this before, however they are known among their peers for doing ‘‘crazy’’, spontaneous things. ‘‘ Like going to London for the weekend to watch a football match or flying to Italy just to use a book I had purchased which used a GPS location and you had to solve clues from the book. We worked really well on that together,’’ Ms van Waaijenburg said.