I’m thrilled to hear that Dave Barry is again hosting his Tropic Hunt (now called the Herald Hunt) this year. The hunts are always somewhere in South Florida, where I grew up, and I’ve done them every year with my family since I was little. They are always outrageously entertaining.
Like most things conceived in Dave Barry’s mind, the Hunt defies explanation. First, let me dispel your guesses. The Hunt, as last year’s official site so sharply explains, is not a scavenger hunt. It is not a geek convention. You are not looking for anything or solving mathematical equations. In fact, you hardly have to know anything at all to win, which is probably why tens of thousands of people participate. You just have to think like Dave Barry.
The Hunt consists of five puzzles woven into the urban landscape that hosts it. The area is small enough that you walk to everything. You have three hours to solve the puzzles in any order you wish, and the puzzles are generally neither mobile nor hidden. You get their coordinates by “solving” typical Dave Barry questions like:
1. If Hurricane Trevor is approaching Florida, while hurricanes Omar, Pauline, Rupert and Sheila are ravaging Florida, only days after hurricanes Jezebel, Konrad. Layla, Morton and Naomi finally left Florida, and at the same time hurricanes Ursula and Victor are strengthening in the South Atlantic on paths that appear to be taking them toward Florida how many hurricanes are we talking about?
A - 8
E - 10
X - Enough hurricanes to make it clear you should move the hell out of Florida.
These questions appear in a special section of the Miami Herald newspaper on the day of the Hunt. At noon, when the Hunt begins, Dave announces the numeric parts of the coordinates, which you can then lookup in a special cartoon map of the area included in the section (sample). I should point out that the entire section, including the map, is part of the Hunt. More on that later.
The solution to a puzzle is always a number. There’s no one way to describe these puzzles, so let me throw out a few examples from years past:
- When you arrived at the puzzle site, you were given a “Herald Hunt Handout” with three (apparent) map coordinates. At the first site, you encountered two speakers numbered “1″ and “4″ drowning each other out with two songs that, if you listened closely enough, were Like a Rolling Stone and Paper Roses. At the second site, you encountered a hippie and a rapper. There didn’t appear to be anything at the third site—a local movie theatre—until you looked at the marquee, which listed two titles: The Cutting Edge at 5PM and Escape from Alcatraz at 9PM. Well?
The answer was simple: each site was a game of rock-paper-scissors. The first paper you got said ‘Handout’, remember? (First rule of the Hunt: everything has at least two meanings.) So the first site was 4 (paper beats rock, or stone in this case). The second site was 2 (the hippie’s “peace sign” was scissors; the rapper’s ghetto hand motion was paper). And the last site was 9 (Alcatraz’s nickname is the Rock, which beats cutting edges, or scissors). Put them together and you got 429, the solution to this puzzle.
- Three men carried upside-down sandwich boards that said: YOUR TIME IS UP. Fourteen floors up, at the top of the Federal Financial Building, the digital clock was stuck on 11:39. Upside-down sandwich boards? Turn the time upside down. Now the digits 1139 spelled “bEll.” At the Miami Beach Community Church, a block to the west, the bell tower had been tolling every five minutes. But this was no regular toll. It was actually playing the song “76 Trombones”, one note at a time; the solution to this puzzle was 76. (People hated this puzzle, because it’s awfully hard to figure out a song when you get one note every 5 minutes :)
- Down on Miami Beach, three areas were roped off. The first contained this, the second this and the last apparently nothing. The first kind of looks like a fort, right? And the second kind of looks like a house…but what about that last one? Well it’s not nothing; there’s sand there, after all. Fort, house, sand. Say it aloud… 4000.
Words don’t do the puzzles justice. Some of them are too twisted and complex to describe, while others seem easy until you’re huddled next to a few thousand other people and your brain-turned-mush is mired in a swamp of inane (and wrong) theories. Over the years, hunters have tasted candy canes that were really orange-flavored, dunked everyday objects in water to reveal messages and scaled buildings only to look down and see that they had been standing on the solution the whole time. A fellow Hunter, Andy Wenzel, runs a terrific website chronicling all 14 hunts since the first in 1984, complete with pictures.
Every puzzle solution (which, again, is a number) corresponds to a clue. The Hunt section contains about 80 number-clue pairs (sample page 1, 2). Obviously, only five are correct; the rest are red herrings. When you think you’ve solved a puzzle, your solution (the number) must appear in the clue pages of the Herald Hunt section. If your solution isn’t listed, you’re wrong. And the only thing more maddening than that is to come up with two possible solutions, both of which are listed.
As with the puzzles, there’s no good way to describe the clues. Some are iconic sequences; others appear to be total nonsense (”As soon as Marge saw the severed giraffe head, she knew her marriage was over”) or contain random pop culture references. You can’t really do anything with the clues until Dave Barry announces the equally cryptic final clue at 3PM which (in its own maddening way) contains the key to deciphering the five clues into a set of instructions—such as calling a number or going somewhere—that ultimately lead to solving the Hunt. Sometimes the clues themselves are meaningful, but it’s just as likely that you’ll end up taking every third word, or every other vowel, or every word before a period to derive a whole new set of clues.
The endgame is the most exciting and challenging part of the Hunt. Many people correctly solve the five puzzles over the three-hour period, but everyone hears the final clue at the same time in the same place, and solving the hunt always requires a number of extraordinarily absurd mental leaps. I won’t even bother trying to describe an entire solution, but I will say that the final action that wins the hunt is consistently ludicrous. Sit down at a local restaurant and order green eggs and ham. Or go up to an apparent “bum” in a Miami bus station and whisper “booger” in his ear. One year near-winners were given a ticket to a local attraction that said “void where prohibited.” They had to enter a bathroom that was marked out of order, go into a stall and rip off a piece of Herald Hunt toilet paper (void where prohibited…like I said, Dave Barry runs this :)
The genius of the Hunt is that it forces you to look at everything in agonizing new ways. Every store, statue, sign and fountain in the Hunt area may be part of the solution, which is especially maddening for local hunters who aren’t used to seeing their own town in that light. All ads and content in the Hunt newspaper section are fair game. Everything given to you at a puzzle may be used again in another puzzle or in the final solution.
The fun of the Hunt is that almost everyone participating is way, way off the trail. You see thousands of people intently analyzing parking meters, buildings, parked cars and other things they’d never give a second thought to any other day. Once the final clue is announced, it’s not uncommon to see people entering local businesses and spouting utter nonsense; they know how absurd past solutions have been. Nobody wants to be the guy who lost because he was afraid to order green eggs and ham or enter an ostensibly closed public restroom.
Once three teams have solved the Hunt (and collected their cruise vacations), Dave Barry comes out on stage and explains the maniacal solution to thousands and thousands of booing fans.
Do I sound like a salivating Hunt fanboy? Well, I am. Don’t let my lame description deter you; come to South Miami on October 29th for an insanely fun time.
