 |
| That's me in a Balinese garden in 2013 |
After ten legs, here are the final stats (average ranking):
Yvonne & Chloe 3.3
Eric & Rona 3.6
Parul & Maggie 3.8
How did Parul & Maggie win?
So statistically, the weakest team in the final team won - not only did they win, but they did come from behind after a terrible start. They took a very slow taxi from Gilimanuk and arrived in Sanur nearly 25 minutes after Yvonne & Chloe. Nonetheless, they managed to climb from last place to first by the time they got to the beach to assemble the boat when they were the first team to realize that there wasn't a judge on the beach to approve their boat for sailing - that was the turning point in this leg for them. A slow taxi dropped them back to second behind the Malaysians Yvonne & Chloe on the way to the memory challenge but a stunning performance at the last road block - the infamous memory challenge - gave them the ultimate victory. I was stunned as I was convinced that Yvonne & Chloe would win when they jumped from last to first midway through the race, given that the language barrier proved to be a huge problem for the Filipino teams. But Chloe's struggle with the memory challenge ultimately gave Parul & Maggie the victory.
Parul and Maggie managed to sail under the radar all the way to the finals without winning a single leg only to snatch victory at the very last moment. This has happened only a few times before: TAR, US S21 Josh & Brent, TAR US S25 Amy & Maya and most recently in TAR US S27 Kelsey & Joey. You see, you'd expect the ultimate winner to have been strong enough to have won a leg or two along the way, I doubt any team would deliberately do badly just to avoid having a target on their backs. With Treasuri & Louisa dominating most of the race, the other two teams probably thought that Parul & Maggie would be easier to take on in the finals than Treasuri & Louisa. In any case, both Yvonne & Chloe as well as Eric & Rona have only won one leg before. Parul & Maggie just never really looked like a threat in the earlier part of the race - mostly keeping in the middle of the pack but safely avoiding elimination. Mind you, Treasuri & Louisa would have probably won this leg if they did make the finals.
The Asian beauty queens win the day.
Out of a total of eleven teams, the two beauty queen teams finish first and second - beating other teams which had plenty of brains and brawn. If anything, this season of TAR has proven that beauty queens in Asia are not just bimbos. Sure TAR casts plenty of beauty queens and models in TAR because they are beautiful to look at - eye candy always boosts ratings especially if you have challenges on a tropical beach, you can't go wrong with having a few beauty queens and supermodels running around in swimsuits. Yes it sounds awfully crass, but TAR is in a ratings war with other popular TV programmes after all. All too often we hear the cliches spouted by the beauty queens/models, "we want to challenge the stereotype that we're bimbos, we may be beautiful but we have brains too". Who can forget Caite Upton from TAR US S16 who proved that she was every bit the vapid, brainless, stupid, idiotic, shallow blonde bimbo whilst on the race? If you haven't seen that season, Caite Upton became a Youtube sensation when she messed up big time during a beauty pageant interview. At least the beauty queens in Asia come with brains too, yes!
Oh man. You know Eric & Rona were my favourite team and I had picked them as a potential winner from the very beginning. After getting on an earlier ferry and blitzing through the first two challenges, I thought they were guaranteed victory. Despite struggling through the lobster trap challenge, they still left the beach in first place. Fate would have it that they struggled to get a taxi to their next location and Paul & Maggie who turned the other way managed to get a taxi a lot quicker. From then on, they fell prey to one bad taxi driver after another - arriving at the memory challenge last didn't help Rona at all as one needs to be calm to try to remember all the details of the previous legs. She was under huge pressure to catch up and that's when the pressure got to her - it was heartbreaking to see Rona completely crumble under the pressure like that and cry. But such is the nature of the game - you can't blame the taxi drivers, you just blame it on bad luck. Parul and Maggie looked as if they had a terrible taxi driver as well and they too struggled with the same language barrier, yet they managed to overcome both of those problems and won in Bali.
Yvonne & Chloe were so painfully close to winning.
Given that Yvonne & Chloe were the only team who could communicate with the taxi drivers, they had a huge advantage over the two Filipino teams who struggled so much with their taxi drivers. Chloe struggled with the memory challenge though and I am quite surprised that Chloe was the one who did this challenge - remember in episode 8, in Jogjakarta, Chloe really struggled with the memory challenge at the Prambanan temple complex, when she couldn't remember the names and positions of all the Hindu deities in the temple. Surely after that experience, Yvonne should have stepped up and planned to be the one to do the last memory challenge. However, given Chloe's ankle injury, Yvonne had no choice but to do the more physically demanding challenge in the previous leg at Mt Ijen, leaving them no choice but to let Chloe do the last memory challenge. If Chloe's ankle hadn't been so injured, I'm sure Yvonne & Chloe could have done things differently and maybe win TARA S5. Bad luck Yvonne & Chloe, you were so awesome.
I didn't like the fact that the teams were so dependent on taxis getting them from one location to another - it seems like a lot of the final leg was left to luck rather than skill and depended on whether or not the teams managed to get a good taxi driver. Bali is a rather big island, so wouldn't it have been better to keep the challenges fairly local, avoiding these super long taxi rides across the island? Or at least allow the teams to have drivers - I guess Grab doesn't operate in Bali even if they do operate in West Java? It just felt like poor planning - so you want to get the teams to Bali to finish the race, fair enough, but you could have allowed them to have done the majority of the challenges fairly close to the Eastern tip of Bali near Gilimanuk so the result would have been more closely related to the performances of the teams during the challenges rather than sheer luck when it came to the taxis. That was just such poor planning.
Why were the taxis in Bali so very slow?
Allow me to explain: there is a speed limit in Bali of 50 km/hr in built up areas. It may not sound that slow but to the racers desperate to catch up or reach the pit stop, it must have felt like a snail's crawl. Bali is a fairly densely populated island, so whilst you may get modern highways coming out of Denpasar, they turn into fairly small roads pretty soon and it is not like these are quiet country roads running through uninhabited forests: there are farms, houses, schools, animals, people and most of all, plenty of other traffic. There are also potholes on the roads and sometimes they could be in poor condition. Cars are expensive for the locals but mopeds/motorcycles are cheap, so there are a lot of mopeds and motorcycles on the roads there and it is stressful to say the least trying to drive in Bali whilst avoiding these mopeds and motorcycles which weave in and out of traffic, so that is why people tend to drive rather slowly and carefully in Bali because of all the hazards on the road. Tourists should never rent a car in Indonesia and use a taxi or public transport instead. Yes I'm speaking from experience: been there, done that, learnt my lesson the hard way.
 |
| Was this such good publicity for Indonesia? |
Allow me to be blunt: Indonesia is a painfully corrupt country, the taxi drivers have a relatively good living in that they are able to earn hard cash from the rich locals and foreigners who can afford to pay for a taxi - if they break the speed limit, they would be caught by the police who would want to extract a sizable bribe from them. In Singapore, if you are caught speeding, you pay a fine; but in Indonesia, the poor taxi driver ends up paying a much bigger bribe to avoid having his taxi impounded at the police station for days whilst the police 'process' the paperwork for his offence. It's bribery, it's extortion, it's corrupt and ugly - and that's the harsh reality of life in Indonesia where the police (and other officials) are paid so little they have to resort to extracting bribes to top up their meager incomes. Having dealt with the Indonesian bribery system too many times already, I can see why a Balinese taxi driver would refuse to break the speed limit no matter how the Filipinos screamed, "cepat-cepat, please!" Is this good publicity for Indonesia? Probably not, but those of us who have been there, speak the language and know the country well will simply shrug our shoulders and say, "yeah it's a poor third world country, what did you expect? Aiyoh. Please lah. Just go somewhere else like Singapore or Malaysia instead if you don't want to have to deal with this kind of mentality."
Well, I liked all three teams really. No drama then.
You see, there's always an element of drama in any TAR finals when there's a team you really like and you want to win but if also there is a team you really hate and you don't want them to win. I remember how in TAR US S25, I wanted either Amy & Maya or Adam & Bethany to win. Bethany has one arm, come on, how can you not want someone like that to win? And then you have the nasty team Jim & Misti who are so strong but so evil and I really wanted them to lose. So when Amy & Maya finally won, I remember how I was screaming in joy as a true fan because I got the result I wanted, ie. the villains Jim & Misti did not win. But in the case of TARA S5, well, I liked all three teams in the finals. Heck, I liked the top four teams very much, they were all lovely people who never fought and worked well together. The nastier, more irritating contestants had already been eliminated earlier on and only the nice guys were left. So my favourite team didn't win, but hey, I would have been happy with any of the final three teams winning. How can you dislike any of the final three teams? Now if JK and Mike made the finals, that would have been a totally different story.
Did anyone else notice just how awkward deputy minister Pitana was when Allan Wu was introducing the final pit stop at Denpasar? Nobody told him what he should have done - was he to stand still and smile or do something a bit more dramatic like Allan? He couldn't make up his mind but at the last moment did this vague gesture and then half regretted it because I'm sure even he knew that looked utterly lame. Didn't anyone spare the poor minister a thought and say, "okay, I am so sorry guys that looked awful, can we do this again please everyone? Minister, please just stand there and smile this time." But oh no, they actually used that take - Allan looked fine of course but you gotta feel sorry for Pitana. Geez. Who was the cameraman then and didn't s/he notice what was happening?
Wait, was Tara Bosco at the final pit stop? She is missing! Has anyone seen Tara?
Did anyone else notice that Tara was missing at the final pit stop? The last time we saw her in the programme was during that introduction the final roadblock at Pura Samuantiga (the Balinese temple where they did the memory challenge) when she donned that pink sash around her waist - that was the last we saw of her. What happened next? Did Tara decide that she had better things to do? Was she taken ill? The only people on the final pit stop mat when Parul and Maggie got there were Allan, the deputy minister Pitana and that pretty Balinese dancer (whom I am sure was not Tara Bosco). Tara usually does the greeting but it was in fact Pitana who did the final greeting. Crowning the grand winner of the Amazing Race is such a crucial moment of the programme, I do wonder why she wasn't there?
Everybody loves a heartwarming feelgood story and it is so nice to know that Parul & Maggie are going to use their winnings to help Parul Shah's father who has suffered a stroke and has been in very poor health - the family has a lot of medical bills and you've got to love a daughter who is willing to use her winnings to help her parents like that. I can't help but notice that some of the other contestants are already highly qualified professionals (there's a lawyer, a few TV presenters, a psychologist, a few business owners and even one who works in corporate finance). I can't help but think, yeah it's just US$100,000 - to some of the racers who have very good jobs, this isn't that big a deal, it's not like US$1 million which is the grand prize in the US version of TAR and the biggest prize for any TAR. So really, there couldn't have been a more deserving winner. Well done Parul & Maggie, congratulations! Pagbati!
So that's it from me on TARA, the next installment of TAR for you TAR fans will be in TAR US S29 which will air on the 21st April 2017. TAR Canada is scheduled to be filmed sometime next year and aired in late 2017. We still don't know if TARA will be returning for another season but we certainly hope it will given that it has had pretty good ratings and has proven to be a hit. Fingers crossed. I hope you've liked my reviews of this series - I know I am not the only blogger writing about TAR, but modesty aside, I'm the most well traveled amongst them and am only one who has visited the vast majority of the locations whilst matching any other blogger/podcaster when it comes to TAR knowledge. If you have enjoyed my blog posts, don't forget to check out my Youtube channel as well, let me know what you guys think please. Many thanks for reading: terima kasih, kobkhun karp, cảm ơn rất nhiều, salamat po, 谢谢大家, kum siah!
No comments:
Post a Comment