Old School Amazing Race

Awww yeah, this is the Amazing Race I fell in love with. TAR returned to its roots this week with teams visiting very foreign cultures and dealing with obscure forms of livestock and crappy vehicles.

Teams fled out of China to the middle of Mongolia. On the way a bus and train seating situation bumped all the teams together to start Mongolia even. That's the thing about the Amazing race, unless you have an eight-hour plus lead, you can always get caught up to by other teams. In Mongolia the teams experienced local culture and got lost, as per usual.

The smushing of all the teams waiting for the buses gave us a look at the teams actually being quite friendly, something that usually isn't apparent of existent in previous seasons. Someone typically becomes a target and factions form. That's not to say that won't happen, but at least at that point teams were genial.

Moving on to the nitty-gritty, let's look at the detour. Teams could either pack up the fabrics and such that comprised the walls and ceiling of a nomad shelter and pack them in a specific manner onto a camel, or, take an oxen-like animal and cart out to a river and retrieve water to fill a tank. If in that situation I think I would've gone with the filling of water, though it's a close call this time. Far too often the producers make one task so simply physical that teams gravitate to it. This time the teams split a little, with some teams switching tasks more than once. My reasoning with the filling challenge is that you know exactly what needs to be done, herd this ox-thing to the river, get water, return, fill, and repeat. With taking down the nomad shelter, you can easily get stuck on not understanding the methods used and the only examples were pre-packed. No demonstrations.

Another game-note was the specifications of transportation. Almost every time teams receive route info they are given specific instructions on what types of transportation to take (on foot, by taxi, by bike, etc). This week the teams had to leave the detour area on the horses they rode there on, and with all the safety equipment provided. This meant funny looking helmets that more than one team had misplaced during the detour. Those are the most frustrating set-backs, when you assume you don't need to remember or keep certain things only to need them later.

The roadblock this week was shooting a fire arrow to a target. I just watched Survivor:Africa this weekend, and their fire arrow challenges were fresh in my head. Interesting to note: two roadblocks have been immediately before the pit stop, within a couple dozen feet of the finish mat. The first roadblock was actually in the middle of the leg, the fish eyes, but afterwards was the surprise elimination. This puts more pressure on roadblocks that typical for AR. Just something of note.

And finally, this episode we got a reminder on car policy on the AR: it breaks, you're screwed. Well ok, technically it's that the producers produce another car, but no time credit is given. My summary stands as accurate.