So one Saturday morning, not very long ago, I had to get up very early (very early for me anyway) – earlier than I get up on any weekday. Now you may ask, what was the purpose of this, it was to drive the new Toyota Corolla Altis! The last time I talked about Toyota was for the Toyota Vios 2010 facelift quite some time back.
A few of my friends have the previous Corolla Altis but I’ve always been interested to try the new 2.0L Dual VVT-i engine as it looks pretty powerful. It turns out we weren’t just going to be driving the car but we also had some challenges in a kind of treasure hunt style to complete.
There were two teams, black and red (I was on the red team) as signified by our t-shirts. We were briefed first, a little about the new 2011 Corolla Altis and the changes, plus what was going to be happening during the day.
We were also given a Twitter hashtag during the briefing and told to use it as the amount of people that replied to us or retweeted us with our teams hashtag would influence our final score.
My team mates were the famous food bloggers Kampung Boy and City Gal.
After that we started the challenge properly, the first of which was to see how many boxes we could fit in the Altis boot. Each box had a set number of points (1-5), it turns we could actually fit quite a lot of boxes in!
After that it was time to get in the car and start the race properly! Our second task wasn’t too hard for us, the audio clue told us that it was located at Menara Manulife and something along the lines of:
You need to look for a place where there are people cycling without moving and there are classes that have nothing to do with education, take a picture of your team mate in front of this place when you have found it.
Obviously it’s a gym yah, and there’s a Fitness First in Menara Manulife – so boomz that was done. Onto the third task, the third task went something like:
If David Beckham’s wife were to open a steak house what, what would it be called? Take a picture of your team mate in front of this restaurant?
Victoria’s Station of course, not hard for us food bloggers 
Pretty nearby Menara Manulife too, anyway after that it was time for the fourth task – again food related. But thankfully we got to eat this time. The fourth clue went something like:
A park in the village of Damansara Uptown with good food, have your lunch there and try to spend as close to RM50 as possible.
Village Park Nasi Lemak in Uptown of course! Was so glad when I heard that task haha, I LOVE Village Park. We really enjoyed our lunch there 
The clues were actually given in audio form, not written – so that slowed us down a bit as we had to listen to some of them a few times. The Corolla Altis has a really neat optional DVD-Audio Video Navigation system and Reverse Camera (the GPS came in really useful of course!).
So after lunch we headed off to the 5th challenge, the clue went something like:
Find a mall along the sprint highway with a tropical sounding name, inside you must buy a smoothie for each of your team members. The shop name is derived from the word ‘Bubble’. Please keep the receipt.
Not hard as well as I go there quite often, I didn’t know about the smoothie place – but a bit of Googling solved that! The answer is Tropicana City Mall (or TCM as we normally call it) and the shop in question was Bobalicious Smoothies.
The smoothies were pretty good! Then it was onto the final task, task 6. The clue went something like this:
Some people call this place the city of digital lights, find something related to ICE there and take a picture with it. If you aren’t sure you can use the in-car navigation system to proceed to these co-oridinates…
They proceeded to give us GPS co-ordinates which we used to confirm the place, which we thought we had guessed right – i-City in Shah Alam. Turns out we were right of course Lucky we had the GPS though, really made our lives easier.
And that was it, back to base! The car itself is actually really nice to drive, super quiet and smooth and very comfortable. It looks good too with the new dark interior colour, I like the exterior look too when it’s fitted with the optional Aerokit – it looks quite sporty.
The engine was suitably responsive too as I expected from something with a Dual VVT-i technology fitted. The 7-Speed CVT-i gearbox isn’t as bad as I expected either, not a huge fan of the technology personally.
We got back around the same time as the black team, answered the bonus question and submitted our challenge evidence (pictures and receipts).
The black team got one task wrong, but got the bonus question right so we were dead even before the twitter points were added.
Anyway despite our valiant efforts, we didn’t win in the end – the black team did due to massive amounts of tweets from their followers! Oh well we all had fun in the end.
Thanks Toyota! If you want to find out more about the car, you can do so here:
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