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Koh Madsum, the perfect location for survival style team building in Koh Samui
On 28th March 2014, Making Teams facilitated a survivor island style team building event for 78 delegates from Sierra Wireless, a well-known communications company based in China and Japan.
Departing in style, Sierra Wireless chose to travel to our Survivor location by luxury speedboats, the perfect beginning to a challenging afternoon of team building activities.
The journey took approximately 30 minutes whizzing past the fabulous beaches and resorts along the west coast of Koh Samui, including Chaweng and Lamai, before sighting the large headland of Koh Tan in the distance and opposite, our team building event survivor arena, a stunningly beautiful, unspoilt island, with a large stretch of outstanding sandy beach, Koh Madsum, creates the perfect location for outdoor tropical team building.
Everyone disembarked the speedboats and headed to the beach, excited and ready for an afternoon of adventurous and challenging team building activities.
The group was split into teams of up to 14 participants and their first challenge was to find a place, create a space and build their base, a location for the teams to discuss the challenges and to provide shelter during the afternoon. With only limited resources of bamboo, rope, string and netting, teams had to improvise to create a shelter that would in a survival situation, protect them from all possible elements.
There were many different designs of camp, some were better constructed than others with the main objectives being to provide shelter, be sturdy in the face of strong winds and rain and to be creative in relation to the natural surroundings such as combining the camp with the wild coconut palms around them. The winning team achieved all of these objectives and received the first team building reward necklace.
Next the teams were challenged to win more necklaces by competing in three survival style activities Catapult, Inventory Transfer and Ring stack.
Each team building game required the full participation of everyone in the team with a variety of team building objectives to try to achieve, from placing your catchers in the best zones for catapult and competing to catch the balls, to trusting your team members as you lean as far as you can to place your ring and to work together using problem solving skills to crack the combination of moves to successfully recreate the inventory transfer.
The activities were set out utilizing our idyllic location of a beautiful sandy beach and clear blue waters of Koh Madsum to the full, on a rotation basis, teams had 30 minutes to win the challenge and then move to the next location. Plenty of enthusiasm shown by all participants, all in high spirits and clearly enjoying their afternoon of adventure team building, survival island style.
Once each team had completed the activities, the final challenge was issued with everything still to play for, each team had to select 7 swimmers and decipherers.
The swimmers task was to swim out into the sea, approximately 30 meters, dive underwater, view a letter and swim back to shore. Once they arrived at the beach they had to advise the group of deciphers of the letter which the saw and then the next swimmer was allowed into the water.
Once the deciphers had received all of the letters they rushed with intensity to unscramble the word by writing in the sand using bamboo sticks before then racing into the sand pit to search under the sand to find the letters and make the winning phrase.
This proved to be the pivotal activity of the survival island team building event, as all teams had been in with a chance of winning immunity and taking home the coveted title of Survivor island challenge winners.
Each team was very competitive during the final challenge with lots of shouting and encouragement given from the shoreline right up until the final moments, when the winners of race the letters had known, they had won the Sierra Wireless Survivor Island Koh Samui team building event!
The winners were awarded with their trophy and title and were applauded by all as Making Teams facilitators reviewed each team’s performance in the de-brief before the participants returned to Koh Samui by speedboat for a well-earned evening of rest and relaxation, savouring the adventurous events of the afternoon of spectacular outdoor team building on a beautiful deserted island!
