The Amazing Race 36, Episode 5

Medellín (Colombia) - Santiago (Chile)

The cast and crew of The Amazing Race were flown by chartered plane, off camera, from Medellín to Santiago (with a refueling stop in Lima, Peru, the largest aviation hub in northern South America). So everything we saw in this episode took place in and around Santiago.

Like Sacramento, California, Santiago de Chile is located in a broad, largely level, central valley, two hours drive from the Pacific Ocean to the west and two hours drive from the crest of a high north-south mountain range (the Sierra Nevada in the case of Sacramento, the Andes in the case of Santiago) to the east. Many would say that relatively easy getaways to the mountains or the nearest cities on the coast (San Francisco in the case of Sacramento and Valparaiso in the case of Santiago) are among the advantages of living in either of these cities. But little of that was visible in this episode of The Amazing Race except for glimpses of the snowcapped Andes as a backdrop to the Santiago skyline.

Only those racers who got lost on the roads made it out of the city and into the surrounding foothills. And the racers didn’t visit the most obvious sign of how close Santiago is to the ocean: the vast and astonishingly diverse Mercado Central of seafood trucked in every day from Valparaiso. Santiago’s fish market ranks with only a few others in the world — including those in Tokyo (Japan), Athens (Greece), and Maputo (Mozambique) — as a local tourist attraction, and would have been a perfect site for a locavore challenge for the racers. Too bad they skipped it. If you are ever in Santiago, it’s a must to visit.

Santiago is a much larger city than Sacramento, with a lot more to see and do. That’s not a criticism of Sacramento: Not everyone wants to live in a mega-city. Even in a metropolis like Santiago or Los Angeles, many people live their lives within a short distance of their home, and are more concerned with the character of their neighborhood than with “attractions” of the region that are an hour’s drive away. Neighborhood character and choice of neighborhood in which to stay, of course, especially important in shaping your experience if you are travelling without a car, relying on foot, bicycle, and/or mass transit.

Santiago has an extensive metro (subway) system. But as in Los Angeles, and unlike in New York City, the Santiago Metro network is too thin to get you to many places of interest. Even if you are staying near a Metro station, you will need to take a bus or taxi from the nearest Metro station to get to some of the most interesting sites in the Santiago conurbation, which for me included the Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi.

Santiago is proud to see itself as a cosmopolitan world city, but that doesn’t mean it has to be a characterless “cookie-cutter” city. I was disappointed that the racers were given tasks and destinations (a skateboard park, a climbing wall, busking for tips as musicians in a park) that could have been almost anywhere and revealed little of Santiago’s distinctiveness. The Amazing Race often features eating and drinking challenges, for example, but this episode did nothing to show off Santiago’s culture of food and wine.

If you’re a skateboarder, you may want to skate, visit local skate parks, and meet local skaters wherever you go. That may open doors to learning more about local people’s lives and their other activities. But it’s also worth seeking out things to do when you travel that you couldn’t do at home, and that connect you with different types of people than you meet in your daily life at home. Let’s hope that future episodes of this season of The Amazing Race do more to put the racers in touch with what’s special about the places they visit.