Now now. They explicitly noted that, against all expectations, they did not feel their skin crawl with the heathen ookiness (possibly the temple was defective).

They explicitly noted that, against all expectations, they did not feel their skin crawl with the heathen ookiness (possibly the temple was defective).

Yeah, WTF was that? Way to ruin my respect and admiration for them as a team. I was just saying last week about how much I liked them.

I like Amani so much. She is one kick-ass spouse. I also like how she and her husband do not underestimate the grandparents, speaking of kick-ass couples.

I don't see the grandparents winning, but I bet they could get into at least the final four.

The Department of Fiendish Task Creation pulled a new one -- requiring the reassembly to be done by One partner who didn't do the other task, which randomly selected some of the less-observant teammates, or the ones who assumed they were responsible for half (snowboarders).

The twins got to go out with a big personal bonus -- close contact with elephants, even if it included cleaning up after them. :-) One even got invited to ride behind the mahout!

What the twins SHOULD have done, if they didn't want to beg from the locals, was find a hotel or tourist attraction with a lot of Westerners in it. They might have found a TAR fan who didn't mind driving them around for the day that way.

Was it Amani who thought to ask the taxi driver for his cell phone to take a picture? Or somebody else? That was a moment of genius.

I think it was Justin's sister, whose name I can never remember.

I was surprised the twins were 3 1/2 hours behind the snowboarders at the start of the leg.

They blew through that challenge last week while the twins barely finished it at all.

I loved the shake-ups at the end due to bus service and navigation to/from the final "challenge". Some of the shifts involved more luck than anything but it was nice to see things change up a bit.

I do wish they'd been a little clearer about what was going on with the money for various teams.

They started off with $186. They were all equal in terms of having no money after they had to donate it all to that orphange a few legs back, so everyone was already pretty low on cash, unless they managed to save some since then. The 5000 baht for their taxis in Phuket was about $150, according to Laurence and Zac, but other teams got away with only paying 4500 baht, which would have saved them some money. I'm wondering how much those bus tickets to Bangkok were.

other teams got away with only paying 4500 baht, which would have saved them some money.

Last night, Google told me 4500 baht was $146, so whoever was trying to pay $100 US was really trying to get over!

How long did they have those taxis for? Was the elephant place really far from the bus station?

My guess is they did not have to pay for their bus tickets at all, unless they needed a second ticket for some reason. Even so, there seemed to be a lot of cabbing at the end of the ep so I'm surprised only one team had $ concerns.

They were all equal in terms of having no money after they had to donate it all to that orphange a few legs back, so everyone was already pretty low on cash, unless they managed to save some since then.

If the twins had managed to finally change their money into local currency, they should have had more than the other teams since they got a free cab ride their first night in Thailand (when they only had Indonesian money). So I really don't understand how they wound up with nothing at the end of this last leg.

IIRC, all transportation costs for the team, other than airfare, are paid from their cash, so those bus tickets would have had to come out of their allotment.