The Amazing Race episode 3 recap, Sunday, October 9, 2011.

Tonight’s episode begins with nine teams still in the Race after last week’s unprecedented double elimination. They are in Indonesia, a former Dutch colony dating back 300 years and consisting of 17,000 islands.

Andy & Tommy are the first to depart as the winners of the last leg of the Race. In keeping with Indonesia’s Dutch heritage, many people ride bicycles (still a favorite mode of transport in Holland). Teams will ride with a local cycling enthusiast club, reaching Fort Vredeburg for their next clue. As pro snowboarders, Andy & Tommy are having fun with it, doing wheelies and ‘surfing the bike’ by standing on the bike while riding it. These guys are stunt nuts!

Next to leave are yachtsmen Laurence & Zac, followed by Vegas gals Kaylani & Lisa, engaged couple Ernie & Cindy, identical twins Liz & Marie, dating couple Jeremy & Sandy, grandparents Bill & Cathi, bro and sis Justin & Jennifer, and ex-pro footballer and wife Marcus & Amani. Unlike the snowboarding stuntmen, Jennifer can hardly control her bike and swerves into a building. Crash!

Ernie’s pedal falls off while riding the bike and they lose ground to every other team except Marcus & Amani while they try to get the pedal back on. It won’t screw back in properly, so with typical Indonesian ingenuity, it’s being rigged with a bit of plastic twine. With this stroke of bad luck, Ernie & Cindy quickly fall from 3rd to 8th place.

Andy & Tommy reach the fort and get the next clue. Teams will take a taxi to Salakmalang Village, then get their next clue at the Lesehan restaurant which serves nasi goreng (fried rice, often with some shrimp or chicken and vegetables mixed in). We gets some shots of kids running barefoot along the padi field paths while others are out working in the knee-high water. Andy & Tommy read the Detour clue and it’s “Rice Field” or “Grass Bed”.

The “Rice Field” tasks calls for delivering meals to the workers out in the padi fields and then must plant 300 of their own rice seedlings. The “Grass Bed” task calls for filling two bags full of long-cut grass (like hay), collect two sheep to pull by their ropes while carrying the grass bags, and deliver the sheep and grass to a sheep shed, and then pull up six buckets of water (using only two at a time) from a well into a watering trough.

Andy & Tommy opt to fill grass bags and stumble around as they run across the field paths. Meanwhile, it’s a taxi race with the other teams. The taxi drivers seem to enjoy practicing their road rally skills with nervous passengers in the back seat. That is, except for Marcus & Amani’s driver, who seems to have gotten lost, yet is laughing to himself about it. Marcus does a face palm.

Andy & Tommy face a problem, though, when it’s deemed that their bags aren’t properly filled with enough grass. Now they have to return to the field to fill their bags, dragging their sheep along with them. Laurence & Zac catch up with them for the watering task and it seems they may have used three or four buckets instead of two for the task. Will Laurence & Zac be penalized later? Andy & Tommy finish these chores and collect the directions to Borobudur Temple where they will find their next clue.

Meanwhile, a whole convoy of teams in their road rally racing taxis arrive at the restaurant. Here they split up as different teams pick one or the other of the two tasks. Many of them have trouble staying on the narrow paths and blunder into the soggy padi field.

Planting the rice seedlings is tedious work, perhaps, but it’s a lot more predictable than dragging a couple of sheep around by the rope. The locals are rather amused by how the sometimes uncooperative sheep are treating the teams. Grandma Cathi is having trouble just staying on her feet and has so many spills that her clothes are all dirty. Meanwhile… Marcus & Amani are literally being taken for a ride, still in their taxi.

Andy & Tommy reach the Borobudur Temple, where they must first enter the international visitor arrival shop and put on some sarongs. From there it’s a long walk to the temple and up the steps to where they collect the next clue, a Detour task. Surprisingly enough, Laurence & Zac get there just before they do. The temple was built clear back in the 8th century and then long since forgotten until found again within the dense jungle about 300 years ago. Wow. You can almost hear the chants of “Om” just looking at the place.

One member of each team must go around the temple and seek out all the statues of Buddha, each with a unique hand position. They must memorize and then demonstrate the combination of four different hand positions of all of the statues to collect their next clue. Uh, oh, this could be a problem for those teams that had trouble memorizing a simple Buddhist proverb in the first episode! Laurence and Tommy do the task for their teams and decide to team up themselves to make sure they both get it right.

Meanwhile, Liz & Marie and Kaylani & Lisa complete the “Rice Field” task and are running in 3rd and 4th place respectively. Marcus & Amani, in last place, finally arrive to the restaurant and have to go into no-huddle two-minute offense to try to catch up. The other four teams are still delivering their sheep and grass and pouring water. The sheep do their best to delay them and Marcus ends up carrying his sheep instead of leading it on a rope.

Jeremy and Sandi are the next to leave the “Grass Bed” task in 5th place, followed by Ernie & Cindy, Justin & Jennifer and Bill & Cathi in 8th place. Marcus & Amani arrive to the sheep shed but don’t have enough grass. For some reason, they decide not to deal with the sheep anymore and switch to the “Rice Field” task. Fourth down and eight teams to go, they’ve decided to punt. But Marcus emphatically says they’re not going to quit. {Is it any coincidence that the airing this episode was delayed by a football game, of all things?}

Laurence and Tommy finish their count of each of the four hand positions, arriving at 17, 17, 17, and 18. Laurence, however, fails to demonstrate the hand positions, even if the count may have been correct. Meanwhile, Kaylani & Lisa arrive to the temple in 3rd place, followed by Liz & Marie, Bill & Cathi and Ernie & Cindy in 6th place. Jeremy & Sandy have a problem, though, when their taxi decides to overheat and has to stop one kilometer short of the temple. They decide to hoof it.

While teams are supposed to keep track of the larger Buddhas with hand positions, some team members go around counting every little image of Buddha they can find. Oops. There must be hundreds, if not thousands. Laurence, working with Tommy, recount 17, 17, 17 and 18 and is able to demonstrate the hand positions in order along with each count. Out comes the clue! Nice work. Tommy repeats the same sequence and the two cooperating teams are on their way to the Pit Stop.

The Pit Stop is somewhere in the temple grounds and it’s huge, so this could take a while for teams to find. Phil tells us the last time to check in “may be eliminated”, leaving open the possibility of another non-elimination episode.

Just as Marcus & Amani arrive, Andy & Tommy are on the way out and meet them. They decide to be nice guys and tell Marcus & Amani what the count and hand positions are, just like a quarterback audible on the line. After so many false starts, Marcus & Amani now have an opportunity to get in much better field position.

First to arrive at the Pit Stop mat are Laurence & Zac. Phil tells them that they’re the first team to arrive and they cheer until… Phil tells them that they used four buckets to pour the water at the sheep shed instead of two buckets as instructed. They incur a 15-minute penalty and watch Andy & Tommy stroll in a few minutes later to officially finish in first place. They win a trip to Dubai, where you can be sure there’s no snowboarding!

Finally, four of the teams (Ernie, Jeremy, Justin and one of the twin gals) decide to cooperate and discuss the clue in an attempt to get it right, as none of them were even close before. Marcus is on his own and in spite of being given the answer from Tommy, he wasn’t paying attention and now doesn’t remember what they were told. Tweet! Five yard penalty, delay of game. Bill is on his own and doesn’t get it right, and same for Lisa.

Marcus stumbles into Lisa and tells her about the counting clue he got. Meanwhile, the gang of four are arriving at the solution themselves. Bill, meanwhile, has figured this out on his own, gives the right counts and hand signals, and Cathi is ecstatic! Wow, don’t count these elderly folks out just yet. They’re still going places.

Starting with Justin who gets it right, the gang of four give their answers one after the other. It’ll be a race between them to the mat for almost simultaneous placings that won’t matter much. Lisa follows them later and also gets it right. Soon after, Marcus also gets it right. It’s going to be a foot race to find that mat, folks. Anyone getting lost at this stage is doomed. And they can’t go to the mat until their waiting taxis have been paid off, too.

It seems Bill & Cathi got sidetracked as Jeremy & Sandy appear at the mat in third place. Justin & Jennifer arrive in fourth, walking along with Ernie & Cindy in fifth. Marcus & Amani score a field goal to finish in sixth and stay out of last place. (Whew, for them.) Bill & Cathi are next in seventh. Now two teams remain… and the twins Liz & Marie are totally delighted to finish in 8th place.

Alas, Kaylani and Lisa, for all their good efforts during the day, arrive at the mat last. Phil tells them, “I’m sorry to tell you that you both have been eliminated from the Race.” Lisa can speak, but Kaylani is completely speechless, trying very hard to hold back her tears and grief from losing. Finally, Kaylani is able to speak and she says that she has been thinking about her daughter Seneca all day. She’s sorry she couldn’t go further as it’s hard for her being a single mom. She’s worried that she failed her daughter, but Phil tells her he thinks her daughter will be proud of her for giving it her best shot. Farewell, ladies, may ye and yours fare well.

Next episode: Teams travel to Thailand, riding on fast speedboats, doing some serious cliff-face rock climbing work and spending some time on the beach with umbrellas flying around.

Stay tuned!