Thursday, March 22, 2007

The end of the Amazing Race

Greetings from Khao Lak!

The Amazing Race ended yesterday with a very busy day. We basically spent the day at Railey Beach, near Krabi. The day consisted of a lot of physical challenges. The first involved swimming 400 m out to sea. Then there was a time challenged based on a (supposedly) Thai game where the teams were attached by the feet and had to perform various acts like finding Menthos in a pile of corn starch, eating a whole bunch of Durian-flavoured cookies, cutting a pineapple the Thai way and then tying it to a tree, then eating it without using hands. Here are a few pictures.

Trying to eat pineapple without hands

mapineappl, originally uploaded by Galadryel.



Corn starch and pineapple on RP

rpineapple, originally uploaded by Galadryel.



I didn’t do so well, not having trained for a while (yes my LiveWellFit friend, I will get back to it!) . Poor Vini had to eat all the Durian-flavoured cookies followed by a complete chili pepper (!) and was sick twice afterwards, quite understandably so. PV impressed us by swallowing a WHOLE chili pepper in less than 5 seconds.

Then we had to hike in jungle between two beaches, climbing up and down. Finally we had to attempt rock-climbing a practice wall (none of us had climbed very much before). RP managed to get to the top on both sides, and made it look easy although it was his first time rock-climbing! PV managed to beat me and get the first stop! Finally we had to sea-kayak across the bay with one partner being blindfolded. Apparently PV was paddling blindfolded while speaking loudly “this is the stupidest thing I’ve done, I can't believe I'm doing this” etc etc… Other sea-kayakers on the bay were baffled at seeing us do so, let me tell you! We had to go to the Princess cave, realize that it was a Linga that was the symbol there (a phallic symbol!), paddle blindfolded back to the main beach and then run on rocks to the flag. The final bonus was that throughout the day, we had had to carry an egg around with us all the time and not break it while doing all these fun-filled activities! That was kind of funny, especially during the rock-climbing and sea-kayaking part!
Overall it was an exhausting day!

Railey Beach was also very pretty. The clouds came in the afternoon to give us a nice sunset:

railey, originally uploaded by Galadryel.



At the end of the day, we had the pleasure to submit our tour organizers Tina and Damian to our own little Race. We had them running all over the hotel with clues. It was quite fun to sit on the other side for once! Vini had the Jackfruit Food Challenge for them.

In the end, well, I must say that we finished sixth. Mostly because we hadn’t played our Wild Card very well and that the last day was mostly physical challenges that we weren’t really up to. But really, it was all in good fun! And the winning team, McHappy, will buy a brick at the Ronald McDonald’s house in Melbourne with the winning prize and put all of the trip’s team names on it. So really it is all for charity!

We all talked about the highlights of the trip. It was a nice contrast to two weeks ago in Saigon when we all introduced ourselves and had mentioned the craziest thing that we’d done. Most people had outdone the craziest thing in their life – need we compare skydiving/bungee jumping vs. eating locusts and tarantulas???

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