Company Trip At Tiara Beach Resort, PD

"The Tiara Beach Resort Port Dickson, an "inland sea resort" with the environment and ambience of a natural beachfront comes with what is believed to be the biggest man-made beach in Malaysia"
-- Cuti.com.my & Malaysia Hotels.net

This was where we went to for our company trip last weekend, all 155 of us (inclusive of families, staff from Penang, JB, China and Philippines). The resort looks fairly new but slightly understaffed. Some rooms took longer time to be cleaned and there were A LOT of flies and flying ants (those brown ones with a bit of a smell) around the F&B lounge, apartment corridors and lifts, so room doors and windows have to be shut at all times.Despite that, the place wasn't too bad after all.

View from the 1st floor of the Resort Lobby building
Room
We stayed in Studio Apartments which has 2 super single beds, a corner sink area, a small bathroom and a lovely living hall. The air-conditioners were centralized but just switching on the 2 ceiling fans alone were enough to chill the whole room (Labu and I just didn't want to wake up at all!).

Studio Apartment
The living hall in the apartment
F&B
The buffets were so-so, not too bland and I kinda liked their chicken curry (this is coming from someone who doesn't take hot & spicy food!). There's a small, open-air cafe at the center of the resort. You can relax, enjoy the wind and watch people having fun in the pools. The only slack thing is that, the cafe closes quite early in the night, so the nearest place to go to is the bistro which is probably 30 steps away from the resort lobby. But it closes at about 11pm during weekdays and 1am on weekends.

Fountain in front of the Buffet Lounge area
Water Activities
Apparently the pools take up about 5 acres of space there, surrounded by white sandy beach. They're not very deep though, probably about 4 feet high. You can hop into the slides, or lepak by the "waterfall". If you're not a pool person, you can tan yourself by the beach, they've got those lazy benches here and there.

Malaysia's largest man-made beach
Other Activities
There's this open-air stage where they have Exercise activities every 8am, free gift for the first 10 people who join in. Then at 8pm, they will show movies. Last Friday night, it was "National Treasure".

The ballrooms are nice and spacious. The ballroom we took, Tiara 2, was big enough to fit in 15 tables. As for other function halls, they're all located on the 1st floor of a row of shoplots (same row as the bistro), each hall huge enough to fit in roughly 5-6 tables. That was where we had our departmental team building activities.

The pool view during daylight
The view as the sun sets
Tiara Beach at night
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The highlight of the trip was the Inter-Departmental Talent Nite Competition which was held on the 2nd night, at the cafe. They provided us a movable stage. Other departments presented a musical skit, sang and danced. My department did an Oscars 2005 cross dressing style. We acted out certain parts from The Ring, Titanic, The Matrix, Charlie's Angels and Shaolin Soccer. We didn't win, coz apparently the judges were too conservative about the cross dressing part. :( However, we were definitely the most entertaining one and the most cheered on, especially when the "girls" came out as Kate Winslet (for Titanic) and Charlie's Angels.. All dressed in sexy bareback tops and long, smooth hair wigs. They actually have greater bodies than us real girls!!! We were all suprised that we didn't win. Some colleagues said they surrendered to us, even our bosses Big Cat and Dexter both said that if they were the judges, we would have won hands down. No matter, win or lose, we aimed to entertain. And we know that our performance will always be talked about for years to come. *lol*

Overall, although it was only at PD, the resort wasn't too bad after all. What the most important thing was that, it was the people that made the whole trip fun and truly memorable. ;) By the end of everything, I was truly, truly exhausted. You would too, if you helped to organize the trip. Let's see...

Pre-Trip :
1) Bought hamper and prepared all the materials needed for the departmental team building
2) Helped make the wigs and costumes for the "girls" (bareback tops made out of extra cloths; huge, huge "breasts" made out of toilet roll paper and the wigs out of strands of plastic bags and garbage bin bags.. Not very easy lehh!)
3) Held skit practices, prepared the powerpoint slides and made sure all the equipment needed for the skit were available

Trip Day 1 :
1) Co-ordinated the departmental team building
2) Emceed for the company dinner

Trip Day 2 :
1) Helped co-ordinated the telematch
2) Skit

Super tiring lar.. But I like it. I like doing all the behind-the-scene stuffs, maybe that's why I've been in the organizing committee for nearly 4 years now. *Gasp* One thing's for sure, it helps me to get to know the rest of the colleagues, remember their names, and storing all their mobile numbers into mine proved to be very handy!

Back to the current moment, I'm now only catching up on the weekend news about SPG and our famous local blogger Kenny with his red boxers pose. Oh... My eyesssss... My eyessss.... *lol*