To comprehend the divergent plots converging in this latest leg of The Amazing Race is to understand what is so wonderful about the show and also what has become its folly. One may knock oneself senseless trying to figure out how and why teams would go — and so late in The Race — from such an exotic locale as the caliphate of Oman to the beautiful yet unremarkable English-speaking paradise of Perth, Australia, which resembles nothing more earthy or foreboding than Redondo Beach, California.

By David W. Taylor (Email The Author)
Reality Reel Media
04.30.06

For us Americans the lure of The Race has always been watching fellow Americans haggle through distant lands and through cultures less familiar than our own. The Amazing Race 9, having set foot in Muscat, Oman, was accomplishing this superbly. Seeing the outcome of Oman's rigid governing traditions in the "clean," ultra-spartan and "pretty" city landscapes (and a beckoning McDonalds that looked more like a mosque than a cheap eatery) was enough to open one's eyes to something completely different in the outside world.

But yet again The Amazing Race
dropped the ball. Instead of plunging into the people and mind of Oman, the teams were swept off into the nondescript desert for a Roadblock that could have been played-out out on a Hollywood sound stage. That desert patch of sand in Oman looked no different than one in Africa or one in Tunisia. The loss of a nation's signature during The Race is where things begin to fizzle.

<img src=http://image.realityreel.com/2006/04/30/bj_tyler.jpg align=left> I think the most compelling Amazing Race moment in recent memory, in what should be a constant series of similar events each Racing hour, was witnessing BJ & Tyler comment on the ubiquitous hitchhiker dotting Oman's highways — a legendary American pastime long since abandoned — and then the pair deciding to pick one up to assist them in their drive to Seeb International Airport.

This is when we meet the curious Abdul Hamid who, festooned in seventh-century garb fit for a sultan, states amazingly in passable English, "I am Bedouin. I am from the desert." The meeting of this Omanese Bedouin and our similarly nomadic American bedouins, BJ & Tyler, is the kind of cultural introspection and melding that would make The Amazing Race constantly interesting, instead of just, right now, occasionally so.