I enjoyed it, although the climax - with the 2 teams racing to a hilltop within 20 seconds of each other - did seem a bit contrived.
Great gesture by the winners though to donate at least half of the £20k to charity - after seeing favella kids in Brazil.
Totally agree that it's a great gesture and good on them. I do worry about charitable gestures doing things that governments should be doing. However, let me just raise that comment as a small flag here - I do not want to detract from that pair of contestants.
I wonder what the show's total budget was.
Jen from Reading annoyed me a bit at times though!
Ah - reality TV highlights facets of people and leaves them open to skewed personal criticism. Although forum 'norm' discourages personal criticism, where someone - and the includes all the contestants - put themselves in the limelight, that 'norm' is relaxed by their choice. Much of the show is about personallities, and part of the selection procedure for contributors is to find personalities who will generate ratings
.
The other thing that struck me was how few (if any?) long distance railways there are in South America (unless they were too expensive to use) and how many buses there are!
The rail network of South America is overviewed at
https://repositorio.cepal.org/bitstream/handle/11362/6325/1/S0700313_es.pdf (but, be aware, this text is over 10 years old)
The railway infrastructure of the South American region presents a network design for a purely exporting economic model, according to the type of economic system prevailing in the first half of the last century.
Due to the absence of integration policies, investments in railway infrastructure were channeled mainly on lines that provide access to overseas ports.
Within this scenario, however, as a result of government decisions, significant investments were made in railway infrastructure at the time, for regional integration, especially in the Southern Cone, many of them abandoned and others in a precarious state and with obsolete technological level. An example is the railway link between Argentina and Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay.
The current rail road transport network shows significant restrictions in infrastructure for intra-regional cargo transport (national as well as international) and presents the greatest weakness of the system. On average the density of railway infrastructure in the sub-region is one of the lowest in the world, although the region has a relatively high density of navigable rivers compared to other regions.
The railway infrastructure and the operating systems have been restructured and reformed in the last ten years. However, the low infrastructure quality of the network restricts the use of trains for the growing demand of the economies. The condition of the network limits the load capacity and speed limits. Although much of the network has passed into private hands, it has been difficult for concessionaires to carry out sufficient investments to overcome deficiencies in infrastructure, or public policies have not been effective in generating sufficient incentives for this to occur. Until now, multimodal regulations and links to other means of transport are lacking, especially with river transport.
Here's a map from that report (recoloured to make rail clearer, and I suspect the projection compresses the southern end)
So ...
- few railways
- those that do exist not going where the contestants were going
- poor condition, slow and infrequent passenger trains if any
Noting the map is out of date, and a line shown does NOT confirm a passenger train!
There are metro systems in some South American cities:
http://www.projectmapping.co.uk/Europe%20World/southamericatrai.htmlBut those fail to be going the same way / distance that the contestants were going.
