Race Location Opinions: What Makes or Breaks Them?

[Jac]

Simple question: what, on a personal level, makes a good/interesting Race location or alternatively a bad/boring race location?

 

For me, I tend to be the most interested in race locations that I have visited/lived in. I think the most interesting element of the race when it is in familiar locations is the element of insider knowledge as a viewer.

 

When the race visits Australia (I'm from Australia and I've visited every state/territory with the exception of NT and have a fair idea of distance and travel times between most locations) I don't get a sense it being boring because I know and more often than not have been to the locations they visit, it becomes about things like 'OMG you are catching a taxi between Manly and Sydney City during peak hour, say goodbye to an at least an hour of your time and $50+ (Taxis are hideously expensive in Australia. I live 5 miles from Melbourne city and a taxi from the city to my place costs $20 non-peak), don't you know that the ferry costs about $10 and takes about 40 minutes for the slow ferry or $18 and 20 minutes for the fast ferry!'

 

I visit a lot of countries in southeast and east Asia fairly frequently (Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Hong Kong and China in particular) and when the race visits any of these locations it is a mix of the familiar and the experience I have when watching an Australian leg and a sense of I had no idea that place existed, I'll have to make a point of visiting next time I'm in town.

 

Apart from that I prefer locations that are either very remote and beautiful and usually costal or huge bustling cities. 

 

Boring locations tend to be those that encourage bunching. 

[lianau]

I usually don't like legs where teams have to sign up for one of xy charter planes, ferries...  leaving xy minutes apart . Too much bunching for taste . Trains and buses at least run on schedules and there is a chance of teams missing them . I prefer self driving legs, it's much more fun and requires teams to do some actual racing .

Same thing with detours and roadblocks , make the teams do it (so no tandem parachute jumps ect ... that don't allow for position changes), throw in a stubborn donkey somewhere and I'm good . 

So , a good location allows for self driving and competitive tasks with the least amount of bunching while a bad location shuttles you around from one task to the other without any real competition .

[SnideAsides]

It's hard to say. I think more than 'good places' or 'bad places', the producers tend to get stuck into ruts and repeat the same concepts over and over when visiting countries - Swiss Alps, Japanese Game Shows, wacky sports in Britain, gross food in China, pop-cultural stereotypes in Spain (in two and a half legs in the country, we've had tasks based on La Tomatina, Rafael Nadal, Don Quixote, the Barber of Seville, Spanish hams, flamenco, and two separate phony-bullfight tasks, though at least we've been spared a copy of the Israeli version's Macarena task), and so on - which doesn't help.

 

But I could definitely do with an extended absence from the likes of Chile, Germany, and Singapore, which never seem to truly work when the race visits. (On the other hand, this is now the longest we've ever gone without a trip to India - the last visit was TAR20 - and as much I was usually in the first class cabin on the Enough Already train, it's well and truly time to go back.)

[Lingo]

Wow, it's pretty amazing that they haven't been back to India in 5 seasons!

 

A bit off-topic, but I'm always excited when they go somewhere new.  They've been visiting a lot of islands in recent seasons, which is cool. But it feels like there's still parts of the world that I'm surprised they haven't visited more often, like Eastern Europe. I only remember one visit to each of Poland, Finland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and Greece.  And why not try some of the smaller countries like Estonia, Lativa, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Albania?  And surely most of the former Yugoslavian countries are stable enough to visit now? So is it a matter of security issues, or transportation ones, that the Race doesn't go to eastern Europe more often? Poland's a big country; I would have expected a lot more visits there by now.

 

Another area they seem to avoid is northern South America, i.e. Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana -- though maybe there are good reasons for that (poltics, drug trafficking, terrorism, etc.)?

 

Mexico and Central America too.  I know some may feel that it's lame for the Race to start off going somewhere so close to the US, but this area has barely been touched (I remember visits in only S3, S7, S8, and this season).

 

Of course it'd be great if we could see more of Africa but I understand the difficulties there. Also, TAR Australia went to Jerusalem and I wish TAR U.S. could go there too.

 

I'd really like to see a map of the world with all the countries TAR U.S. has visited marked!

[Netfoot]

I'd really like to see a map of the world with all the countries TAR U.S. has visited marked!

 

That might make an interesting Google Maps project.

[SnideAsides]

Wikipedia has that image. If you want to include the other versions as well, the others you'd need to mark are Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Venezuela, Cuba, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Israel, and Georgia.

[Lingo]

Yeah, as soon as I wrote that I did some Googling and eventually found that map. Good ol' Wikipedia!  And clearly my memory is failing me because now I see that they have been to Croatia, Estonia, and Lithuania, and Poland twice as well.

 

And completely off-topic, I'm chagrined and amused to discover that I'm apparently an authority on TAR because I'm cited multiple times on the TAR Wikipedia pages -- for writing a couple of informal articles for fan websites where I repeat stuff that either can be readily obtained from watching the show, or stuff that was basically just hearsay on the TWoP forums!

Edited December 8, 2014 by Lingo

[SnideAsides]

I know the feeling. I'm cited a few times on some of the Survivor pages.

[lianau]

 

But I could definitely do with an extended absence from the likes of Chile, Germany, and Singapore, which never seem to truly work when the race visits. 

I'm from Germany and I'm always a bit disappointed with the German legs . It seems like they're stuck in Bavaria or Berlin.

[Lamb18]

They were in Hamburg once, weren't they?  I think they had to drink beer out of a boot.

[Jac]

I'm from Germany and I'm always a bit disappointed with the German legs . It seems like they're stuck in Bavaria or Berlin.

 

I feel the same way about the race when it visits Australia. There is a lot more to Australia to Sydney, the bush and the outback.

[Star Aristille]

On ‎12‎/‎10‎/‎2014 at 7:23 PM, Jac said:

I feel the same way about the race when it visits Australia. There is a lot more to Australia to Sydney, the bush and the outback.

Well, they had one leg each in Perth and Darwin, too, both in TAR9, so I think that the show knows that there's more to Australian than all of what you mentioned.

[ApprenticeFan]

On 11/7/2017 at 11:22 PM, Geenee said:

Right, non-American editions have already visited Melbourne (c.f. Madrid and Jakarta) and Tasmania remains Terra Incognita for God knows what reason.

Melbourne was originally as the first destination of the False-Stars season, but the production changed their mind that would be budget-wise.

Edited November 15, 2017 by ApprenticeFan