TAR S31 E3: Bad choices or bad luck?

Hello guys, xin chào, bạn khỏe không? Wow, this third leg in Vietnam certainly brought some surprises and changed the way I perceived some of the teams. I thought Leo and Jamal could do no wrong on this race but what do you know - they really struggled in Vietnam despite knowing how TAR works really well. Turns out the Afghanimals are only human after all. And what about redemption for Becca & Floyd in this leg which was extra sweet, since they did get eliminated in TAR S29 in Vietnam? So it was a non-elimination leg as well, but hey I did predict correctly that Chris and Bret will come in last. I was so wrong about was the team that would win this leg though, so let's see what the statistics tell us after leg 3.

Average rankings after leg 3

Colin & Christie: 3
Leo & Jamal: 3.33
Nicole & Victor: 3.33
Tyler & Korey: 4.67
Rachel & Elissa: 4.67
Becca & Floyd: 5
Janelle & Britney: 6.33
Corinne & Eliza: 6.67
Chris & Bret: 8 (spared elimination in a non-elimination leg)

Let's talk about Colin & Christie

Look who's number one in the rankings despite not having won a leg yet! I had forgotten just how strong they are as a team back in season 5 (which was way back in 2004 - Colin had much longer hair then). But they dominated that season, winning 6 legs and finished 2nd 3 times, but they made a costly error in the last leg by not checking if their flight to Fort Worth from Calgary was going to be on time and got stuck with a delayed flight. They might have still had a chance to overtake Chip & Kim (the eventual winners of that season) but their taxi got a flat tyre on the way to the pit stop in the end, making them arrive in 2nd place only by about 10 minutes. There's a brilliant video to summarize Colin & Christie's journey in TAR S5 by Youtuber Peridiam and I recommend watching it if you're a big TAR fan like me - yes Colin had a temper back then but you have to admit that they are absolutely brilliant as racers. After having watched the video below and seeing how Leo & Jamal are only human as they struggled with the dance challenge in this leg, I am beginning to think that Colin & Christie could actually win this season and I would love for them to do so; especially since I think they were somewhat cheated in TAR S5 by bad luck! I love the way they work well together and are always very supportive of each other; what I dislike is when teams turn on each other, the way Rachel said so many horrible things to Brendon when they ran the race together and this time round, she has vented her frustration at Elissa during the dance challenge.

How bad is the language barrier in Vietnam? 

Amongst all the countries I've been to around the world, the language barrier in Vietnam was one of the worst. I remember when I was in Vietnam - I spoke English (the international lingua franca), French (the former colonial language), Mandarin, Hokkien and Cantonese (three languages from just across the border in China and China has been sending more tourists to Vietnam than any other country in the world since 2011) but found that practically everyone was monolingual and spoke only Vietnamese. Even the staff at Hanoi airport struggled with basic English! If you were to walk into a nice 5-star hotel or a very high-class boutique, then sure yeah, the staff there would speak some English and even French or Mandarin, but simply jumping into a taxi and trying to communicate with the taxi driver in English is probably not going to work. You can at best show him an address in Vietnamese and hope that he knows his way there - that's it. Some well educated young people do speak a it English and your best bet is to find a well dressed young person who looks well educated to ask for help, but I don't want you to think that the people there are unfriendly just because they don't speak English. There's a huge difference between refusing to help someone because you simply don't have a common language to communicate in and being downright unhelpful or unfriendly. From my last trip to Vietnam, I can assure you that the Vietnamese locals are indeed very warm and friendly, they just don't speak much or any English at all. You can blame the education system there for failing to teach them English, but please that doesn't mean the locals are unfriendly people. I live in London and we speak English here, but this isn't exactly a friendly city - quite the opposite!

What went wrong for some teams in this leg then?

Well firstly, some teams had trouble navigating their way around the city in their taxis - now that's pure bad luck. The team ran out of the airport at Ho Chi Minh City and grabbed the first taxi they could find - Leo & Jamal along with Janelle & Britney had a really hard time getting to CREATV dance studio to get the dance challenge with the famous 218 Dance Crew, they lost so much time just driving around. Likewise for Tyler & Korey, they were just plain unlucky that the prawns weren't biting - there really isn't any skill or technique when it comes to fishing for prawns in that kind of prawn farm. The ponds would have a decent number of prawns and it was just a matter of luck whether or not you could catch those 8 prawns quickly or not. But the biggest mistake of all has got to be Chris & Bret choosing to do the dance challenge instead of going fishing - even Corinne & Eliza assumed that they would choose fishing over dancing and that they were stuck in traffic instead of dancing. They wasted so much time trying to learn the dance and gave up only after trying once, then they switched detours. Whatever made them choose dancing over fishing - haven't they watched previous TAR episodes before and saw how devilishly difficult and demanding some of these dance challenges can be? And I hate to say this, but these guys aren't exactly physically fit, why would they pick such a physically demanding challenge over a much easier fishing challenge? None of it makes sense and thus for that, they finished last as I predicted correctly last week. They now face a speed bump in the next leg, which makes them once again the most likely team to get eliminated.

Let's talk about some good decisions that the teams made in this leg. 

Yes Tyler & Korey may have struggled with the prawn fishing challenge due to bad luck, but I still believe that it was a good decision to go fishing because many of you will remember just how much Korey struggled with the dance challenge in Tbilisi's Rustaveli theatre in TAR S28 E7 when they were the very last team that mastered the extremely difficult Georgian ballet challenge. They were facing elimination because Scott (of father and daughter team Scott & Blair) actually completed the challenge just before Korey did, leaving Tyler and Korey in last place. But as fate would have it, Scott grabbed Tyler's bag by mistake and had to return to the theatre to get his own bag, thus erasing any lead they had eliminated - when the two teams got to the Peace Bridge in Rike park, Tyler & Korey narrowly beat Scott & Blair in a foot race to escape elimination in one of the most dramatic TAR finishes. I'm sure they would remember that episode well and that probably made them choose fishing over yet another difficult dance challenge. Likewise, Victor made a snap decision to try to do the Karaoke challenge when he got annoyed by Eliza who was yelling "la la la la la la la" for no apparent reason - she was out of tune, those weren't the lyrics, was she simply trying to put the other teams off when they were learning the song? Anyway, Victor's decision was a great move as it moved them up from 3rd to 2nd ahead of Colin & Christie, giving them two 2nd place finishes in a row - so ignore the 6th place finish on the first leg in Tokyo, they're actually an incredibly strong team right now who are making some very strategic decisions. Also, hats off to the "post U-turn peace offerings" - it's nice to see people behave with some grace and dignity on the race for a change, after all the U-turns are a part of the game in TAR. I still have bad memories from S29 when things got real ugly at the U-turn. 

Why are the dance challenges so extremely difficult? 

This is because it relies on something called muscle memory - whilst the dance moves themselves are difficult at all, the sequence is very long. This is quite different from the kind of memory challenge we saw in the last leg, whereby some teams had to memorize the Lao alphabet. This is way harder because you are remembering physical movement and some people who have taken dance classes for years would be totally used to this kind of muscle memory exercise - they would be able to pick up a complex dance routine with ease but if you do not regularly attend dance classes, then my advice would be to avoid these dance challenges on TAR if at all possible. Not only are they crazy difficult, but you're up against racers who have had the advantage of dance training and they would find dance challenges like this a walk in the park. It doesn't matter how physically fit or strong you are - this is a memory challenge as much as it is a physical challenge. Now I don't know if the actual studio area they were rehearsing and performing in had any kind of air-conditioning, but Ho Chi Minh City is hot all year round as it is in the tropics. Putting on that costume and dancing that routine over and over again would have been so demanding physically, to the point where your brain will become totally frazzled from the heat and the exhaustion just when you need your brain to be at its sharpest for the memory element of this task. Rachel & Elissa took 18 attempts at the dance challenge and Leo & Jamal took a staggering 27 attempts - goodness me, both of those teams would have been much better off fishing since the other teams that did the dance challenge got it in a few attempts. But hey, check out the videos I have found of the 218 Dance Crew, they are awesome!

The karaoke challenge was way too easy. 

Oh boy. It really irked me that that the racers were given a transliterated version of the lyrics during the karaoke challenge so that they could read the words as if they were English words. Unlike Laotian, Vietnamese has been romanized and implemented nation wide in 1910 under French colonial rule (it had been written with Chinese characters previously). However, even if you do speak French, oh boy - you cannot pronounce the words as if they were English or French; Vietnamese has its own system of pronunciation. Take the Vietnamese word for "thank you" for example (which I did hear a few racers attempt to say), it is written as cảm ơn - but if you tried to pronounce it as 'cam on' in English, you'll just get blank stares from the locals. It is more like gKum uhn - the C is like a cross between G and K and the vowel sounds in cảm ơn do not correspond at all with their equivalents in French or English. They use so many accents as well in Vietnamese which are unique to Vietnamese. Oh and on top of that Vietnamese is a tonal language as well so pitch plays a big part in pronunciation. I speak several tonal languages but even I struggled with Vietnamese. Now those of you who are also big fans of TAR Canada would recognize Kingdom Karaoke which was featured in TAR Canada S4 E4 where the teams had to learn how to sing a Vietnamese song as well ("Shine Your Light") but the lyrics were not transliterated into English but were given in the original Vietnamese instead - so it was a much harder challenge as the teams either had to learn the song by heart before performing or simply take a crash course on Vietnamese pronunciation and both options are crazy difficult. The TAR Canada version of the challenge was much better structured because it made the Karaoke task far more difficult, thus making it far more possible for teams behind to try to catch up.

More of Vietnam coming up! Who will be eliminated next? 

The teams will stay in Vietnam for one more leg and why not - it is such a fascinating country, I certainly want to visit Vietnam again. As for who will be next to go, I'm sorry but it will have to be Chris & Bret again. Statistically they are the weakest team, they made some fatal errors of judgement in leg 3 and on top of all that, they have a speed bump. I really don't think they can avoid elimination again in the next leg. Other than that, Corinne & Eliza and Janelle & Britney are doing slightly better than Chris & Bret, so if Chris & Bret somehow avoid elimination, it would be one of these other two that will be eliminated. I think it will get interesting after the next episode because we would have lost most of the weak teams (if Chris & Bret are eliminated) - but then again, will the teams get a bit more strategic in the next episode? We did see the formation of a Big Brother alliance this episode. After all, if I was in the middle of the pack, I would definitely want to help Chris & Bret last as long as possible. Not because they're nice (don't be stupid - this is TAR, not a popularity contest) but you would much rather take a weak team with you into the finals whilst getting rid of stronger teams along the way. But having seen the way Leo & Jamal struggled in this leg, I would be less surprised if a strong team eliminated because of a poor decision or even a navigation error. But if the other teams are not going to do anything new, then Chris & Bret's elimination will almost be inevitable. It's nothing personal but somebody has got to be eliminated in the next leg.

Who will win the next leg? 

Ah, after this leg, all bets are off -  I am no longer going to assume that Leo & Jamal are going to win everything. I say the average statistics have to be taken with a pinch of salt given that two very strong teams survived a double U-turn in the last leg - so that proves how formidable they are but at the same time, it does put a dent in their average ranking statistics. So I would say that the teams that could win include Becca & Floyd, Tyler & Korey, Nicole & Victor (they have definitely proven themselves worthy having done well in the last two legs), Colin & Christie and I'm never going to write Leo & Jamal off. My favourite team this season is Tyler & Korey so I am pleased to see them do so well in the race - I'd love to see them win a leg! So we have gone from this being a two horse race to a situation which is far more fluid and unpredictable - that's a good thing for the show as it makes the season a lot more exciting. One thing that is going to be slightly different about this next leg is that they are clearly still in Ho Chi Minh City, they are not having to take a flight and all bunch up at the airport, so that means that teams that have done very well in leg 3 will be able to retain some of their lead going into the next leg which will make it a lot harder for the teams at the bottom of the pack to catch up. If that is the case, then we're looking at a close fight between Becca & Floyd and Nicole & Victor in the next leg. I was glad to see Becca & Floyd thriving in Vietnam this time after they got eliminated the last time in Vietnam because of heat exhaustion.

And here's my dilemma guys. 

After this next leg (episode 4) in Vietnam, the teams will be flying off to Split, Croatia for their next leg (episode 5) and quite coincidentally, I will be in Croatia when that episode airs! Like seriously guys, what are the odds? However, Croatia is a rather big country and I had planned to be in a totally different part of the country, to visit Dubrovnik, Mostar (in Bosnia) and Kotor (in Montenegro). I had completely forgotten that they will be going to Croatia this season and I wasn't even thinking about being in Croatia for to visit the TAR sites in TAR S31 E5. But here's the problem: the episode airs on the 15th May in the US so it will be early morning in Europe on the 16th before I can get my hands on an episode of it. So I could travel to Split the day before from Mostar, wake up very early on the 16th May, watch the episode then try to hunt down the places they visited in that episode. So I could realistically visit two of sites in central Split: the Diocletian Palace and the Matejuska Pier. There's one other place: Kasjuni beach which is quite some distance away and one other site in Split which has not been revealed yet. So I know I can do this and get a bus at 15:45 to arrive back in Dubrovnik by 19:30, in order to be at the airport by 21:00 for my 22:30 flight from Dubrovnik airport back to London. It sounds doable if not incredibly rushed. I wasn't planning on going to Split on this trip but now I kinda feel like I have to go for my TAR credibility! If it all goes well, then yeah I'll get on the bus, it arrives back in Dubrovnik in time for me to have a quick dinner before heading to the airport but otherwise if the bus is delayed then I might even miss my flight! I suppose I can sleep on the bus and on the plane. Well, at least it'll be a lot easier for me when they swing by London later this season.

So that's it from me for now guy - who would you like to win season 31 then? Once again, many thanks for reading!