My real concern is: WHO IS IZAD and how did he know that the teams were going to the Batu Caves first so that he and his "team" could get there before they actually arrived?
Does he possess some kind of psychic powers or does he have an in with the production crew?
Hi. My name is Izad. I'm 30 years old. I've lived in Malaysia all my life (except for the 3 years of college in England). I work in a computing firm in Kuala Lumpur, and I do freelance writing for several publications. I'm a reality tv show junkie, I love cats and despite what puddin says, I really AM Balding.
Anyway, back in early December, one of my readers told me that the Amazing Race All Stars was possibly coming to Kuala Lumpur. I had a lot of doubts at first, but after a few days of beggings, pleadings and returning sexual favours (kidding!), I found out that he might actually be teling the truth. I finally got a tip off that they could possibly be in the Gombak area on December 10th. I quickly grouped a couple of friends who were as enthusiastic about TAR as I was.
We suspected it would be at Batu Caves cause basically that's one of the major tourist attractions in that area. We had no idea what time they were coming in.. so the 5 of us actually went there before 6 am (the sun still wasn't up). We saw a couple of vans with cameras and stuff.. and thought we had hit the jackpot. but it was hard for us to, you know, 'hide' from them cause there were nobody else there at the time. We finally saw them erected the TAR cluebox, and that's when we knew... THIS WAS IT! Luckily enough, we only needed to wait for two hours to see the first team arrive.
We realized we had to split up if we want to continue on spying on their entire route, so that's what we did (if you're wondering what I meant by 'stationed'.. we had to delegate the trailing tasks between the five of us). And the rest, is history.
None of us had any direct contact with the production team. Well, I personally tried to be the 'innocent' passerby and asked two dfferemt crew members at different times at the Batu Caves, but neither said anything.. well they actually said "we can't say anything". So we just stayed. And watched. And listened.
They couldn't ask us to bugger off because Batu Caves was a public touristy area. In fact, they were other people taking pictures at Batu Caves as well. The general public there might be confused because at that time "The Amazing Race Asia" was airing, so I think people there were a bit confused (you'd be surprised to know how many people think that all these shows.. Amazing Race, Survivor etc are all done in 'real time'. LOL). At Hartamas, I was actually shushed away by one of the crew members (that bitch!) when I slowly inched towards and started a conversation with Charla. So yeah, we didn't get any inside info directly from them. All we had was the Gombak tip off.
I'm pretty sure many of you, being HUGE TAR fans, wouldn't do anything differently than what we did. 'Chancing' on seeing these racers in action, is like a dream come true for any TAR fans. I sincerely do hope, some of you will get a similar chance like this in the future, cause personally for me, it's the closest thing I'll ever get to being on the show itself!
As for spoiling this entire leg.. I don't know.. there were only 5 of us. And we had to split up a lot of times, so other than our observations, a LOT of it also includes our assumptions as well. They might be several things that we missed (like for example, we didn't know the Chas actually performed the cookies detour, and we honestly don't know what the website clue meant by the locals helping the racers "in surprising ways"), so a lot of things are still up in the air. And we don't even know how the editors will edit the episode even with all this information going around.
I had my reservations about sharing this spoiler at first because Chill One's All Star Survivor bootlist spoiler totally ruined the entire season for me. Seriously. Because it's a bootlist. The end. There's no room left for assumption or speculations and I hated that. Which was why I only decided to release our 'suspected play by play' this week instead of way back in December. I really wanted to.. I mean, as a TAR fan, it really was something that only TAR fans could possibly appreciate. There were some people who keep saying that I was posting it for the 5 minutes worth of fame, and I'm playing the 'I know something that you dont' game with them. But I just wanted to give some leeway for them to continue all the speculations and things. Hell, I could've already said on December 12th that Romber was 100% out of the game, but I didn't cause I wanted to give Romber fans some kind of hope and not give up on the show.
This spoiler thingy.. tricky business aint it? It's hard to please everyone. LOL
Anyway, no worries.. no more spoilers from me. I think I already told what we know about the leg. We could be wrong with some of the info, but based on our discuassions, assumptions, eye witness accounts, that's how we think the leg will play out.
AND I am continually amazed by all your spoiling efforts here at RFF. You guys are amazing! And I really mean that!
Keep up the excellent, EXCELLENT work!