Snapshots of Life!

MindValley Retreat in Pulau Tioman

White sand, blue waters, palm trees, snorkelling, corals, brilliantly colored fishes, gorgeous sunsets, beer with grilled seafood

Sounds like a scene out of The Beach (yeah, the one where Leo Dicaprio starred minus the drugs)?

Actually, what I just described was MindValley’s annual island retreat on Pulau Tioman.

We left on Thursday night, and boarded the bus to Mersing from Pudu Raya (central bus station in KL). After traveling through the night, we arrive at the jetty in Mersing at 5am, and spend the next 2 hours trying to catch up on precious sleep. Well, actually that was just me…the rest of the team headed off to get breakfast.



Friday

At 7am, we boarded the ferry and began our lil’ adventure to Tioman. Probably about 100 meters from the jetty, the ferry comes to a grinding halt. It seems we have overloaded the boat, and the tide is way too low for us to "float". So we sit there and watch as other boats (with lesser people) slowly go past us laughing at our misfortune.

Vishen and Mike contemplate getting the entire MindValley team into the water to either raise the boat or push it (I’m not sure) but none of us are keen on the idea. Can’t blame us, we would be more heroic on mormal days but we just endured a stinky 5 hour bus ride.

Anyway, the boatman whips out his mop and starts jabbing it into the sand to dislodge the boat. The mop trick works…and we are free….this time, all the passengers sitting at the back move to the front of the boat.

Very soon, we pass one of the earlier boats that had laughed at us. They are STUCK too! We pass them, and Vishen dares me to flash the loser sign. I resist for fear of inviting bad karma.

Anyway, we finally get to the island, and get our second round of breakfast. At 11am, we are sitting under a shady spot on the beach running through mission, vision and strategy work. We all share our expectations with the team, and go through a year-in-review session.

The fun part was that I got to faciliate an appreciative inquiry session which would be useful for the recruitment, and HR side of MindValley.

We ended Friday with dinner and a few rounds of Mafia.
Tip 1: Don’t listen to Vishen because he always gets the innocent people killed. :P
Tip 2: Don’t let a Polish guy be the cop. (Yes, Uncle D..I am referring to you)

Saturday



We get into full beach gear for the snorkelling trip. Chetan and the IBM guys arrived over night to join us for Saturday’s fiesta. We split into 2 speed boats, and pretty much spent the rest of the afternoon swimming among the fishes and admiring the corals. Reinhart (Austrian - IBM guy) was the "merman" among us. Everytime we were looking for people, you would see Reinhart’s flippers in the air marking the spot where he was diving.



The rest of the evening, we sat on a wooden hut and had pizza and lots of "ethanol mixed with water". Hazy memories of Saturday night….

Sunday

We get up in the morning and find that the water supply has been cut. So we bake in the sun and play in the waves while waiting for the water to be pumped back up. In the end, only Anita, Khailee and I get to enjoy the luxury of showering which also causes us to be really late getting to the jetty. Eduardo (Peruvian - IBM guy) shows off his diving skills…

We arrive back to KL at 12:30am, hence marking the end of our MindValley Island Retreat.

posted by Li'er @ 7:38 PM