Apa kahbar and hello everyone, in this episode of TAR, we move onto Bali, Indonesia. This episode marks the 6th visit by TAR to Indonesia and their third visit to Bali, having been there in S22 and S28. This is a country I know extremely well - I grew up in Singapore which shares a maritime border with Indonesia, I speak Indonesian (not fluently, but I get by) and I have visited Indonesia many times, including Bali. But before we discuss what happened on this leg of the race, let's look at the average ranking of the teams after this 4th leg in Bali. Spoiler: no surprises here, not much has changed.
Average ranking after leg 4 in Bali
- Jonathan & Ana 1.75
- Scott & Lori =2.25
- Carson & Jack =2.25
- Alyssa & Josiah 4
- Melinda & Erika 4.75
- Brett & Mark 5.75
- Pops & Jeff 6.5
- Nick & Mike =7.75
- Han & Holden =7.75
- Bernie & Carrigian 8 (eliminated in Bali)
What was the point of sending them to that travel agent in Osaka?
I really didn't see the point - all the teams except Bernie & Carriagan ended up on the same flight there and it was a far cry from the good old days when teams scrambled to book their own flights to the next destination - that was more fun.
Yes but they won despite having made a really dumb strategic error. They wasted their express pass on a task that was just time consuming hard labour - threshing rice is hard work but there is very little skill involved in the process, you just have to bust it out under the hot sun until you reach the required weight. In any case, they have already assigned themselves the lowest amount to fulfil and yet they just panicked and used their express pass on what is a relatively easy task? Oh dear, I'm shaking my head in disbelief - compared to the Penjor detour later on, the rice threshing task was easy whilst the Penjoy task was not only time consuming but required a lot of attention to detail. Would an intelligent team waste an express pass on an easy task like that? Haven't they done their homework and watched plenty of past seasons of TAR in order to avoid this rookie mistake? Okay, so they pick up yet another win and statistically look super strong at the moment, but all that is going to change next week as there will be a double U-turn and Jonathan & Ana are definitely, 100% confirmed going to be U-turned as teams will vote which teams will be U-turned. Huh, cue the scene where Jonathan & Ana look at each other in total horror as they realized they should have saved their express pass for a situation like that and they had made a really dumb mistake in Bali. The TAR fan in me is happy this happened because it is not fun for us viewers when one team is so strong that their victory is a forgone conclusion - we've seen Brett & Mark make a terrible error of judgement in leg 2 in Osaka and in this episode, it is Jonathan & Ana's turn to make the same kind of mistake. This means that whilst I'm sure they will probably make the finals, I wouldn't be so certain that they are favourites to win if they can make mistakes like that. Heck, even if they get U-turned next week, they will still survive another leg given that there are still plenty of weaker teams left at this stage but an equally poor error of judgement later on in the race and the consequences will be a lot more grave then. Hold on tight folks, next week will be very interesting!
Are we surprised at this elimination?
No, hardly I'm afraid. As Bernie & Carrigian were the last team to depart Kyoto, they could not make the first flight out of Japan to Bali, hence they arrived last at the ATV challenge and started this leg at the very back of the pack. Jonathan & Ana sealed their fate by assigning them the 25 lbs option at the rice threshing task. They started in last and never got out of last place, things just got from bad to worse on the way to the detour when they wasted even more time getting hopelessly lost when they failed to see a sign right in front of the clue box. They seemed deflated as they realized that the odds were stacked against them in this leg - there was no way they could have overtaken a team on the ATV ride, they were doomed to last place at the rice threshing task and they had picked a detour that was very time consuming. Quite frankly, these two were bickering and arguing so much right from the start that I was just glad to see them put out of their misery - the race is an extremely stressful process and I really don't think they had the kind of friendship that can be subjected to this amount of stress without them just imploding under the pressure. It was definitely not fun for them as they were dragged so far out of their comfort zone and I question whether or not they should have been cast in the first place. After all, TAR receives thousands of applications every seasons including from hardcore fans who would give an arm and a leg to be part of the race, should they have even picked a team that was going to just crack under pressure?
Is this yet another case of Ken Lee on reality TV?
I know I make this point every single season but it is a recurring theme: I refer you to the case study of Valentina Hassan from Bulgaria on their programme Music Idol from 2008 - otherwise known as 'Ken Lee'. Valentina doesn't speak English but tried to sing the song "Without You" by Mariah Carey, the result was so bad that it went viral quickly on Youtube. There were two versions on Youtube of this clip: one was just her singing so badly the words were totally unrecognizable, the longer one was of the three judges being extremely rude and cruel to her, openly mocking her for even trying. It was public humiliation and most people reacted to that by feeling sorry for Valentina - yes her singing was bad, but she didn't deserve to be scolded and mocked by the judges like that. But why did they allow her to try in the first place without warning her, "your singing is awful, you can't speak English at all and the judges are going to go out of their way to humiliate you for even trying." Of course, you could argue that this was a precedent that was set by Simon Cowell, another reality TV talent judge who was famous for also being needlessly cruel and nasty to contestants who do not perform well. Thus this begs the question, should they have allowed Valentina to try in the first place, knowing that she was going to not just fail, but make an utter fool of herself by failing so badly? In the case of Bernie & Carrigian, surely the producers realized that they were at best a volatile pair who were going to argue when things got tough on the race and were they milking that aspect of their relationship to get some drama for this season? Granted Phil is always very kind to the racers even when they perform terribly, but my question is this: should they cast teams like Bernie & Carrigian, only to let them crash and burn like that when they know they have virtually no chance of getting far in the process? My personal response to that is that the playing field ought to be level: either cast only teams who are all equally strong or equally weak. I refer you to the British programme Race Across The World (kinda like TAR, just not as good). All the teams cast for the programme are equally weak and hopeless - the reason is that they want the racers to have that genuine sense of wonder and awe when they step into a crowded Asian night market for the first time and not say, "oh yeah, this is just like the one we visited in Taipei last year". It's a very different kind of race indeed only for those who haven't traveled much (or at all), but at least the playing field there is level, when all the teams are equally clueless.
What was the point of the ATV ride? This was a dumb mistake on the part of the stupid producers.
This was a really, hideously stupid decision by production to include a task that had no consequences whatsoever, the teams set out on the ATVs in the order they arrived in - that meant it boiled down to which teams raced out of the airport the fastest, got into a good taxi who then got them to Payangan the fastest. Whilst there was probably a bit of running involved when it came to getting out of the airport, the taxi ride from the airport to Payangan is 46.3 km (28.7 miles) and takes approximately an hour depending on traffic and the route the taxi driver takes through central Denpasar, the main city on Bali island, which lies between the airport and Payangan. So even if you got out of the airport quickly, the order the teams got to Payangan was totally random as it was pretty much just down to luck. The ATVs had to go down a very narrow track and it was impossible to overtake the ATV in front, so the teams left that task in exactly the same order they had arrived, so what was the point of including something like that? Was it some kind of sponsorship deal they had with the company that ran the ATV tours so they can then claim, "as featured in TAR S37" on their promotions? Don't get me wrong, whilst driving that ATV does look like a fun adventure, the fact that it was impossible to change the order of the teams during that part of the race rendered it a totally pointless task and I must say, that means the production team had made a really stupid error of judgement in choosing a task like that. If you want to include something like that, then the only way to make it relevant to the format of the race is to have a break point in the middle of the circuit where the teams have to complete a task (such as solve a complex puzzle relating to the local Balinese culture) before they can move on, that way the slower teams may get stuck there if they cannot find the solution to the puzzle, we then create a situation where the order of the teams can change dramatically as a result of this puzzle. Do I have to teach these people how to construct a decent leg of the race? We need to hold the producers to account when they make dumb mistakes like that.
What do we make of the driver's seat?
I didn't like it - not so much because of the nature of the format of this device, but because the team that got to that board first was determined by an external factor and luck. Jonathan & Ana had the best taxi driver when they got out of the airport and as a result of that, they got to start the ATV challenge first and then got to the driver's seat board first. That messes with my sense of fairness, I feel like a team has to earn the right to do something like that so this is how I would have changed things around to make it a lot more fair. I'll send the teams to the detour first, then the team who excels at the detour and gets to the next task first would have rightfully earned the right to play the driver's seat board. The fact is this is a lot of power to slow down another team and the way Jonathan & Ana gave Brett & Mark only 20 lbs as opposed to 25 lbs for Bernie & Carrigian played a huge role in Bernie & Carrigian's eventual elimination in this leg. For the game to feel more fair for the viewers, this right to determine the outcome of the leg should be earned, rather than an advantage a team gains out of pure luck. I also felt that whilst rice threshing is a part of the local rice growing culture in Bali, it wasn't the most interesting task to feature on TAR - that's an odd choice by the producers. I can't imagine tourists showing up in Bali and saying, "I wanna participate in a rice harvest and thresh some rice 'cos I saw it on the Amazing Race." Nah, there are far more colourful aspects of the local Balinese culture to feature for a challenge like that. So if I was the producer, I'd pick a famous local dance with vibrant, colourful costumes such as the Barong or Kecak dance as the challenge - the team at the driver's seat board can then decide whether the other teams had to learn a short, medium or long dance sequence. Likewise, there are also plenty of local music instruments unique to Bali - the team at the driver's seat board could then decide if the other teams had to learn a short, medium or long piece of music to pass that test. Either way, using elements of local Balinese music and dance would be far more appealing for the viewers on so many levels than seeing the racers do hard labour threshing rice in a field. Overall, I'm very disappointed with all of this.
Do people speak English in Indonesia?
Very, very little. It is the default second language in Indonesia and most Indonesian people would have learnt some English in school, but unless you work in the tourism industry and have to interact with foreign tourists on a daily basis, there's little chance to use it. So even if a racer said something like, "we're in a race, can you go quickly please" to a taxi driver, the taxi driver would have understood none of it and I'm not exaggerating. I'm wondering if these racers realize that people really don't speak English at all in some of the countries they are visiting? I do travel a lot (79 countries at the latest count) and I know exactly what it is like to be stuck in a taxi with a driver who doesn't speak a word of English - when I'm in that situation, I realize that jabbering away in English at the taxi driver is a pointless exercise if there is a massive language barrier. After all, the taxi driver would simply look at an address, drive you there and not have to indulge in any kind of small talk in English. Indonesia is a massive country with 285 million people and if you only spoke Indonesian, you would be able to understand Malay which is very closely related and is a language used in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, so in total, you would be able to communicate with a total of about 330 million people across South East Asia - that figure is closer to 300 million as not every single person in these four countries can speak the language but still, that's a huge number of people you can communicate with in your part of the world without speaking a single word of English. English tends to be the language of the well-educated elite in Indonesia, so you would have no problems communicating in English in Bali if you were to walk into a five star hotel but given how rural the locations were on this leg in Bali, there was little chance that the people they encountered would have had anything more than a very basic grasp of English. On my travels in Indonesia, I had this rule - if your English is better than my Indonesian, we'll speak in English. If my Indonesian is better than your English, we're speak in Indonesian. And 9 out of 10 times, I'll end up speaking Indonesian even though I am far from fluent in that language as that's just how little English is spoken there!
Did the teams try to speak any Indonesian?
Most teams tried to say 'terima kasih' (thank you) but not all of them got it right and before you say, oh that's a mouthful, is there a shorter version - no, there's isn't. Scott wrote down something which read to the taxi driver, I think he was trying to say, "we're in a race, can you go quickly" but his pronunciation was so bad I could only make a calculated guess at what he was trying to say. But I want to give him credit for at least trying (and failing) as that's better than not trying at all.
Did this episode do Bali justice?
Sort of, kind of, I suppose. The teams raced through Tampaksiring and only saw a rice field - I have been there some years ago and like most tourists, I was there to see the famous temples there (there are two of them there which are on the tourist trail) but nope, the teams didn't get to see any of those. There are two sides of Bali - many tourists will stay in five star resorts and have very little interaction with the locals there, they might venture out on excursions to see some famous landmarks and temples, but then retreat back to their resorts after a few hours. Those more adventurous ones will venture out, travel around Bali into the smaller villages, away from the tourist traps and see how the locals live (that's what I did on my trip there). So I am glad this episode did give the viewers the latter, though I have to admit, I'm not fond of Bali. I could spend ages talking to you about it as I want to be fair to the Balinese people and the reason why I didn't have a good time there was because it felt so predatory. Like so many Indonesian islands, Bali is very poor and the locals are very reliant on tourism. So take something as simple as buying a bottle of water from the shop for example, I had to argue with a shopkeeper who tried to charge me about three times the price the local paid. The shopkeeper had taken one look at my foreign face and decided to hike up the price instantly as I looked like a rich tourist, but he didn't realize that I do speak Indonesian and I had overheard the conversation a local had with him a few minutes earlier when she asked him how much a bottle of water cost - it's things like that which makes me feel like the locals are always trying to overcharge tourists because they think we're all so rich. Now if you were in London or New York, it wouldn't matter whether you were a tourist or a local, if you walked into a shop, not only would you pay exactly the same for a bottle of water, the price of the product would be clearly labeled so you can decide as a customer if it was a fair price to pay. All that bargaining in Bali left me feeling exhausted - on one hand, there was a part of me that felt proud of the fact that I can use my language skills to get me the best price every single time but on the other hand, the locals I dealt with didn't feel honest in the way they dealt with me and I don't like that feeling of constantly being wary of that. I have traveled through other poor countries like Sri Lanka before where the locals will never ever cheat a tourist, no matter how poor they are.
Woah, that's harsh Alex, I'm sure not all Indonesians are out to scam tourists.
Well, let me share this one other story then from another visit to Indonesia. This happened just after I visited Borobudur with my husband (who is white), we were in a rental car as we approached a major junction. The car in front slowed down and stopped, so we had to slow down and stop too. Then from out of nowhere, two teenagers on a moped crashed into the back of our car. Evidently, it was entirely their fault but because it was an accident involving foreigners, the whole village suddenly emerged out of nowhere and the two teenagers claimed that we had stopped suddenly, causing the accident. That was a complete lie of course - we had done absolutely nothing wrong and as I do speak some Indonesian, I put on my teacher's tone and tried to reason with these teenagers but in the meantime, a real mob had built up and I feared for my own safety. The teenagers were demanding compensation for their ordeal despite the fact that we had done nothing wrong, apart from being two rich foreigners who happened to pass through a poor Indonesian village. This older man then took me aside and warned me that if they call the police, the police will want a bribe (that's very common in Indonesia, oh yeah, they are so corrupt) and you would spend the next few hours at the local police station filling up forms in a language you are not fluent in, that it was better just to give these teenagers a bit of money and be on our way. I ended up negotiating a payment with the teenagers who demanded the equivalent of about US$100 (note that their moped was not damaged at all in the accident, but there were scratches on our rental car), I bargained them down to about US$25 and got out of there. When I then told an Indonesian friend what had happened, he rolled his eyes and said what the hell were you doing getting a rental car in rural Indonesia? They see a foreigner behind the wheel of the car, they would deliberately crash into you, accuse you of causing the accident then demand compensation - that's a very common scam in Indonesia and that's why foreigners should never ever rent a car in Indonesia. When I am on holiday in Europe, I often rent a car and would never ever face this kind of situation. One of my best friends is Indonesian, I have done business in Indonesia and I've spent enough time traveling the length and breadth of Indonesia to know what I am talking about; so this is why I feel justified in holding such views about Indonesia, having been there, done that already.
Detour: Penjor or Pajegan?
I would have chosen Pajegan, because it seemed a lot easier to memorize the the number of fruits and cakes involved in the offerings. Penjor just looked like hard work, most teams got through it eventually but they all took an incredibly long time given how many little details had to be assembled on the bamboo pole in the right order. But at least in this case, both sides of the detour did seem equally difficult (though I would argue that Pajegan was actually marginally easier), quite unlike the fiasco in the previous leg in Kyoto, where the ninja side of the detour was impossible for all the teams.
Why did the teams get so lost going to the pit stop?
Oh goodness me. Five teams got hopelessly lost trying to find the pitstop, that led to Melinda & Erika finishing a very impressive 4th in this leg. The teams were only about 750 meters (just under half a mile) from the pitstop after they had finished their detour, but the Pura Dalem Pelapuan temple was not in the middle of the village but off on a side street and only Erika was sensible enough to get a local to show it to her exactly where it was on Google maps before calmly walking to the pit stop with her mother - the other teams just seemed to be running around in a blind panic, following the others without realizing that the team in front had no idea where they were going either. It was the blind following the blind and the real hero in this episode must be Erika who calmly guided her team to another excellent finish in 4th place.
What is going to happen in the next leg? Who will win and who will be eliminated?
All the remaining racers will travel to a very famous temple in central Bali near the town of Ubud where Phil will inform them that they would have an open vote for a Double U-Turn - you don't need to be a genius to figure out that the teams most likely to be U-turned will be Jonathan & Ana and either Scott & Lori or Carson & Jack, given that these are the three strongest teams at the moment. Both Scott & Lori and Carson & Jack have an average of 2.25 at the moment, so it is hard to choose between them as they are different but both a threat. However, I think this is a moot point because there are still quite a few weaker teams left at this stage with relatively poor averages so I am predicting that these U-turned teams will successfully complete both sides of the detour, finish at the bottom of the pack whilst one of the weakest teams will get eliminated. I can't see any of the top three teams getting eliminated at this stage even if they do get U-turned. The winner of this next leg will be the team from the top three that is spared the U-turn (probably Carson & Jack - that's just my gut instinct) and it will someone like Han & Holden or Pops & Jeff who will be eliminated next. Between those two teams, I'm going to guess that Pops & Jeff will be eliminated for no better reason that Han & Holden's parents are from Vietnam and perhaps they have visited this neck of the woods before and thus Pops & Jeff are more likely to be fazed by the cultural differences. Yes I know that Nick & Mike are the joint weakest team at the moment but I am going to ignore that and predict that they will survive this next leg for two reasons: they can blast through any physically demanding task and it is highly unlikely they would be targetted at the U-turn so they'll probably sail through this next leg.
Have I changed my top 3 finalists predictions?
No, I haven't. It is still Scott & Lori, Jonathan & Ana and Carson & Jack, with an outside chance for Alyssa & Josiah and perhaps Brett & Mark. The only thing I am less sure about is whom the winner would be - last week I thought it was definitely Jonathan & Ana but after their error of judgment in this episode, I am less convinced now and that is good because we don't want a painfully predictable season. Look out for Jonathan crumbling under stress in the next episode.
What else am I watching at the moment?
Oh I have a rather long list of programmes I'm currently watching: there are a few versions of Traitors out there are the moment (USA, Quebec, Poland), there is The Apprentice (UK), I have just finished watching Wie is De Mol 2025 from the Netherlands and have just started on De Mol 2025 from Belgium. I'm watching the latest season of Jet Lag: Schengen Showdown on Youtube which is absolutely brilliant - it is like a low budget version of TAR with just two teams competing but it works so well because I love the cast this season. I'm also currently watching Destination X from Denmark, having watched the first two seasons from Belgium as well as the ones from France, Netherlands and Germany - it is an absolutely brilliant format and if you like TAR, I think you will love Destination X. Whilst I do speak many languages, I am watching these all these programmes with English subtitles and you would be amazed how easy it is to get hold of programmes if you are a hardcore competitive reality TV fan like me. I mostly use Discord and Reddit to get hold of these programmes along with the English subtitles. There are other great programmes coming out this year as well, with some more to come over spring and summer 2025 but I shall talk about those in a couple of weeks as we get closer to summer and we will get more details of their air dates so 2025 is going to be a great year for competitive reality TV programmes!
I've got another business trip coming up next week to Luxembourg, I'm flying out on Tuesday and flying back on Thursday, so it shouldn't affect me blogging about the next episode of TAR. As always, thank you very much for reading.
Thanks again, Alix - very well done!
ReplyDeleteThank you Pat :)
Delete