The Amazing Race can be your own amazing travel planner
By Brian Miller
The Amazing Race is currently airing on CBS and watching it can give you great ideas for your own travel plans.
Billed as a “Race around the world”, The Amazing Race does take you on a journey around the globe and it is a great way to learn about other cultures.
For many of us, traveling to a foreign country isn’t going to happen. Whether it is financial problems, health risks, safety concerns, or whatever else may be stopping us, we simply won’t see outside the borders of our own country.
The Amazing Race isn’t the best visual opportunity to see the world. You could easily sit though thousands of hours of documentary travel videos and maybe that is something you enjoy. I do, sometimes, but I also want to see a bit more than just a hill, mountain, river, or beach. Sometimes I want to see how the locals live and how normal American tourists may interact with them.
This is where The Amazing Race is interesting. It isn’t the challenges each team of two must compete in to get to the finish line of each race leg, no, it’s the challenges of dealing with a cab driver who doesn’t speak English or a citizen on the street who doesn’t understand what you want in the way of directions.
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Over the years that this program has been on, I have always found it interesting when a team believes that a local is going to know where some monument or ancient church is going to be located 60 miles away. Ask an American in your city where something is at and chances are more will not know than those that do.
Culture is part of travel and whether we travel in the United States or in North America, or outside of the continent, we experience different regions, different dialects, and different views on the world. For most, it is what we see in our stateside travels that we more often experience and most documentaries on foreign travel doesn’t often show the hiccups you can have along the way when you are abroad.
While The Amazing Race is far from a travel brochure and it is a show designed with the intent to entertain you by showcasing the fallacies of the contestants, take a moment to look around and watch the faces of the locals whose lives are also on display in a simple way. It isn’t the best way to see the world but it’s an easy way to escape for an hour and say, “you know what, hun, we should really plan to go there some day”.