We did it! We won the RGS Christmas Quiz! YAYY!!

It’s only about three months now, since Ellie & I started attending events at the Royal Geographical Society, most of which are open to non-members. So far we loved all of them: lectures, such as a recent one about the Northwest Passage, various whole event series about expeditions like the Everest expedition of Mallory and Irvine or Ranulph Fiennes’ Transglobe Expedition, a two-day expedition workshop called Explore Symposium. Last night three buddies of ours and the two of us took part in the RGS Christmas Quiz. And we won!! The tickets had cost £25 per person and included plenty of snacks and either one glass of wine, a bottle of beer, or a soft drink. You could buy more drinks and snacks from the bar.

 

Pictures clearly taken during the quiz, incl. pics above, feature photo, Royal Albert Hall (c) BerkeleySqB. Rest (c) Pexels free stock photography, except where mentioned otherwise.

A QUICK PINT AND LAST MINUTE PREPS FOR THE RGS CHRISTMAS QUIZ

We all met at the beautiful Queens Arms pub on the other side of the Royal Albert Hall, which looked amazing at night, with all the lights. After a few last minute preparations, going through some of the more exotic capital cities, tallest mountains, and most populous countries, we made our way to Kensington Gore.

 

LATE START OF THE RGS CHRISTMAS QUIZ DUE TO PUBLIC TRANSPORT CHAOS

Due to severe delays on the Circle & District Line, the quiz started 40 minutes late at 7:40 instead of 7pm, which was perfectly fine with us. More time to catch up with everyone. Nick, an old friend of mine, had only arrived back from Hong Kong, where he’s been living for the past ten years or so, the night before. He had also lived in Europe for many years and travels widely for work. Kristian, a Fellow of the RGS with a geography degree as well as an old twitter buddy of mine whom I had not met in person before, is one of the most widely travelled persons I know. His job as a project manager gets him to the most exotic places around the world, like Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Vanuatu. He brought his buddy Matt, who happens to work for the Foreign Office, where he travels almost constantly. Matt plans to take another half-year sabbatical next year, kind of a break from travelling, to, ahem, you guessed it: travel. Both Kristian and Matt had lived in various cities around the world and actually met in Asia, while they were both based in Australia. I must say, I had a good feeling about this team from the beginning. Ellie & I decided early on to keep a low profile and to let the pros get on with their jobs. And that’s what we did.

 

CHEEKY AMERICANS IN THE LUCK

I had attempted to prepare for the quiz about a week ago, by studying lists of the world’s longest rivers, biggest lakes, islands, most widely-spoken languages, and so on, but considering that I have a memory like a goldfish, this didn’t bear any fruits. It was interesting to me, though, how much had changed since my uni days, when I actually did know all those facts off the back of my head. For example, the Mississippi has suddenly turned into the world’s 4^th largest river out of nowhere, simply because some cheeky, presumably U.S. American folk had the idea of starting to include one of its tributaries that is actually longer than the Mississippi itself: the Missouri river. Smart move. No such favours for the Amazon, which would be a lot longer if you’d include its longest tributary.

  

BAD MOVE BY OUR SRI LANKAN FRIENDS, AND BAD LUCK FOR KAZAKHS

Places like Sri Lanka have made atrocious decisions about their capital city. How hard was it to remember Colombo? Not very hard. Now the capital city is Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte. C’mon, really!? The good people of Kazakhstan used to take pride in the fact that their motherland was one of only 9 countries in the world with at least one mountain above 7,000m. Then some smart-ass came around with a yardstick and properly measured the country’s highest peak, Khan Tengri. Now it’s 6,995m tall. Oh bugger. The formerly third-largest lake in the world, the Aral Sea, has almost completely vanished, initially triggered by irrigation projects.

THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE IS ALMOST EVERYWHERE

One thing that I had not expected, but that hugely fascinates me, is how often I came across the Northwest Passage during my preparation for the Quiz. For example, out of the world’s ten largest islands, a whole three are inside the Passage, including the world’s fifth largest, Baffin Island, which also happens to be the largest island in the Americas. The world’s 8^th largest island is where this year’s leg of the Northwest Passage rowing expedition kicked off: Victoria Island. It’s smaller than Baffin Island, but still bigger than Great Britain. Greenland, the world’s largest island, is where most people who take on the Passage, will pass by. Our expedition, for example, had gone on land in Greenland, before the official start. Then, of course, most expeditions were organised by the good residents of the world’s 9^th largest island: Great Britain.

  

Pic #1 (c) Encyclopedia Britannica.

EXPEDITIONS OFTEN PASS THROUGH 4 OF THE 12 LARGEST OCEANS, PAST 5 OF THE 10 LARGEST ISLANDS

Expeditions in search of the Northwest Passage have also passed by the world’s 10^th largest island, Ellesmere, Newfoundland (#16), Iceland (#18), Banks Island (#24), Devon Island (#27), Axel Heiberg Island (#32), Melville Island (#33), Southampton Island (#34), and Prince of Wales Island (#40). Furthermore, they would have passed through the largest ocean (Pacific) as well as the 2^nd largest (Atlantic), 5^th largest (Arctic Ocean), and 11^th largest oceans (Bering Sea). Moreover, some of the Northwest Passage expeditions have crossed or followed the world’s 13^th largest river (the Mackenzie), its 8^th largest lake (Great Bear Lake), and its 10^th largest (Great Slave Lake). Not least of all, our expedition took entirely place in the world’s 4^th largest country, where the national language happens to be the most widely spoken language in the world.

  

CHOOSING A TEAM NAME FOR THE RGS CHRISTMAS QUIZ

Nick suggested that we should name our team “The Hermiones” (Hermione rhymes with “shiny” and is the name of the ocean rowing boat which we used for our Northwest Passage expedition), and everyone agreed. The runner-up contender had been “Havana bit of fun.” The other 20 or so teams in the room came up with cool names too, such as “Risky Quizness,” “Kathmandon’t,” “Fequiz Navidad.”

 

THE HYDROLOGICAL CYCLE AT THE RGS CHRISTMAS QUIZ

Our host, whose name I unfortunately didn’t catch, started the introduction with a warm welcome, then went on to go through some housekeeping, such as where the toilets and where the fire exits are, using a hilarious graph entitled Hydrological Cycle. It showed 4 steps: (A) Bar – liquid enters the cycle. (B) Minstrels Gallery (liquid exits the cycle/toilets). (C) Fire exits – in the event of excessive heat. (D) The chute – used to eject anyone found looking at their mobile phone. Next up, prizes were awarded for best Christmas outfit (a guy fully dressed in an elf costume won this one) and best team name (I believe it was Risky Quizness).

THE RGS CHRISTMAS QUIZ IS MORE ABOUT FUN THAN STRICTLY ABOUT COLD HARD FACTS

Our host continued: “Last year, we had a number of complaints, which doesn’t reflect well on me, I’m afraid. I was told that I had trivialised this proud Christmas Quiz tradition. That I had focused on frivolous trivia, not on relevant hard facts about important topics. I was reminded about the long-standing association of the Society with some of the most distinguished explorers of all time, and criticised for not having included more questions about them. So here we are. Explorers.”

 

Pic #1 (c) International Antarctic Centre; pic #2 (c) Natacha Pisarenko/AP.

DOES THIS PICTURE SHOW ERNEST SHACKLETON OR TAYLOR SWIFT? TOUGH ONE.

With this, the slide for the first question was projected on the wall behind her: a picture of Ernest Shackleton and the question: (1) Is this Ernest Shackleton or Taylor Swift? The obvious answer: Ernest Shackleton. Then a picture of Taylor Swift was projected onto the wall together with the next question: (2) Is this Ernest Shackleton or Taylor Swift? The next few questions were quotes which you needed to allocate to either one of the two famous persons. They all sounded like they could’ve come from either of them. All either about the fears, fresh air, about hardship, challenges and so on.

 

COLIN THE CATERPILLAR, OPPENHEIMER, ELMO, AND A PIGMY HIPPO CALLED MOO DENG

The rest of the quiz continued to switch between actual, mostly easy to medium difficult knowledge questions and silly but amusing stuff like guessing the names of Colin the Caterpillar impersonators, such as Cuthbert from Aldi’s caterpillar cake, from fake police photographs, or guessing the song’s name and artist from watching a muted short clip of various music videos. We had to guess which movie won ‘best film’ at this year’s Oscars (Oppenheimer), what the name was of a certain pygmy hippo celebrity in a Thai Zoo (Moo Deng, not the one in the stock photo above), what the colour is of polar bear fur (translucent), which TV character had gained notoriety earlier this year by asking everyone how they were doing (Elmo), and so on.

 

GUESSING CAPITAL CITIES FROM EMOJIS OR FINDING MISSING PARTS ON A MAP AT THE RGS CHRISTMAS QUIZ

We all agreed that our favourite part of the quiz was the one where we had to guess capital cities from emojis. It was absolutely hilarious. Bogota was a toilet emoji and an otter emoji. Baghdad a bag and a dad emoji, Mogadishu a cat emoji, the letter A, a soup bowl emoji, and the letter U. The only one we didn’t guess correctly, was a radioactive warning sign emoji for Greenland’s capital. The runner-up to best quiz round was a world map where the organisers had removed parts. You had to guess the parts that were missing, such as the Falkland Islands, Svalbard, Java and Tasmania. Ellie was the one who found three out of the ten missing parts, which heavily impressed me. Kristian, Matt, and Nick always tended to come up with the answers to the more difficult questions, such as what is the longest (in geographical distance, not in terms of travel time) direct (as in no interchange) train journey in the UK (Penzance to Aberdeen), what is the biggest country without rivers (Saudi Arabia) and the smallest (Vatican), and what the tower climbed by contestants in Hong Kong’s Cheung Chau Festival is covered with (buns).

 

GUESSING THE HEIGHT OF THE WORLD’S TALLEST SNOWMAN

The 74 questions had been split into two halves of 5 rounds each, with a half-hour break in-between. When the results were announced, starting from the lowest number of points (22 out of 74) and gradually moving upwards, our excitement increased. When there was only one other team left besides us, our host announced that the other team and we had both answered 53 out of the 74 questions correctly. This meant that we would have to answer one more question. A picture of the world’s (at the time) tallest snowman, Olympia SnowWoman, built in Bethel, Maine in 2008, was projected onto the wall in front of us. (Not the picture below, but a different one.) Whoever came closest to guessing its height correctly, would be declared the winner of the RGS Christmas Quiz.

A STRICTLY SCIENTIFIC APPROACH TO SNOWMEN AT THE RGS CHRISTMAS QUIZ

Luckily, Kristian takes a scientific approach to everything. First he made a small-scale drawing of the large scale projected photograph on a piece of paper. I’m guessing that he then measured the distance from the sole of the foot to the top of the head of the man standing closest to the snowman. Subsequently he estimated the distance that the man was standing away from the snowman, as well as the distance between the snowman and the photographer, say, 10m respectively 35m. In a next step he measured how often that distance, say 1cm, would fit into the distance from the bottom to the top of the snowman, say 10cm. In a next step, he considered the angle from the viewer to the top of the snowman, and the angle from the viewer to the middle and the bottom of the snowman. He divided the overall height into two segments and then did some multiplication or weighting exercise, intended to take into account that 1cm at the bottom of the snowman would, at the near-horizontal, only slightly upward angle and with the distances at hand, roughly correspond with an actual height of 200cm (if the man is estimated to be 180cm tall), whereas at the top of the snowman, at a 45 degree angle and with a much bigger distance between the observer and that part of the snowman, it would most likely correspond with something more in the region of 350cm.

   

Pic #1 (c) Sun Journal, Maine.

WINNING THE RGS CHRISTMAS QUIZ

Kristian arrived at the conclusion that the snowman would have to be roughly 30m high. The other team guessed 22m. When the host announced the answer, 37m, it was clear: The Hermiones have won this year’s Royal Geographical Society Christmas Quiz!

SPLITTING THE LOOT

We shared some of the sweet stuff with our closest competitors, then split the rest of the loot, a bottle of prosecco, cookies, chocolates, a Christmas stollen, and a copy of Tim Marshall’s book Prisoners of Geography. Then we thanked our brilliant host, and we all walked back to South Kensington tube station, before wishing each other a Merry Christmas and going our separate ways. There can be no doubt: for years to come, the five of us will now be like the Ironmen and -women of trivia. Just like there is no Ironman who has ever managed NOT to mention their achievement during the first minute of any conversation, we will find ways of mentioning our feat last night at every possible occasion.

Looking for more posts about things to do in and around London? Check out my articles about our tours of London on a helicopter and in a kayak, about East Sussex’s famous Crowborough Caves, a motocross taster course in Suffolk, a deep sea fishing trip from Brighton, my jump from an airplane and rides on a jetlev and in a powerboat near Cambridge, that time I dived through a short sump at Swildon’s Hole cave in Somerset, and the two-day outdoor first aid course Ellie & I recently did near Rochester. I’ve also blogged about Papua New Guinea and Bhutan travel trivia, about things that had freaked me out about Everest Base Camp, but that had turned out to be very different, about peasant’s food having turned posh, and about our recent trip to Tanzania.