Ooh! Pretty! Boats and water and permanent sunlight! There’s a three-hour ferry ride to the next clue and that leaves time for I Hate You Too to make a list of teams they won’t give the Express Pass to, which is pretty much everyone.

Detour! Hang Your Heads or Hammer of the Cods. With Hang Your Heads, teams will string together six bundles comprised of ten fish heads and lay them out on drying racks. Hammer of the Cods involves collecting cod from a drying rack and pounding out one kilo of fish into jerky. While teams wait around for taxis to take them two kilometers, the Beardos and I Hate You Too run for it. This fish head task looks gross, (I assume) smells gross, and the sound of the fish sliding onto the metal spike is gross.

The poles to hang the fish bunches on are marked with red and yellow flags, but this detail blows right past I Hate You Too. The Massholes get it right, and so do the Beardos, but the feuding exes can’t figure it out. They demand help from the Beardos as she dangles promises of an Express Pass at them, but the Beardos aren’t as dumb as they look and leave them to struggle and possibly kill each other. They eventually realize that the end of the poles are marked, but not before most teams blow right past them.The teams then take a high-speed boat ride to a fishing village where they will find their next clue. Roadblock! Take a leap off of a bridge, splash down in the Arctic Ocean, and swim to the next clue. Then they have to get back to shore, hook up a truck to a sled that’s loaded with a granite boulder, and pull it enough to reveal their next clue which is a bag of coins. In other words, this is a product placement for the truck.

Diving into frigid, Arctic waters, even in a wetsuit, looks painful. But The Amazing Race demands it, so you do it.

So you know how there were to different tasks at the Detour? Well the only two teams to choose the cod hammering were the Oil Riggers and the Golddiggers. And you know how one task is always much, much harder than the other? Well, this is the harder task. And it takes a long time. So while everyone else is jumping off of a bridge, the Oil Riggers and the Golddiggers are hammering dried cod into jerky. So the Oil Riggers and the Golddiggers are pretty much fighting to stay out of last place.

The pit stop for this leg of the Race is at the Viking Longhouse which is just what it sound like—a long house, and something something something Vikings. The Beardos check in as Team Number One (whoo hoo!) and they’re still racing! Go go go Beardos! Next out of the boulder moving task are the Massholes followed by I Hate You Too. But I Hate You Too are awful people, and therefore bad things happen to them. They picked up the coins, but left the clue so they have no idea where they are going.

Um, the LaLas don’t know how to drive a stick shift. Going on The Amazing Race without knowing the basics of working a stick shift is like going on Survivor without knowing how to make fire from two sticks and some coconut husk. They ask the Oil Riggers how to put the truck in reverse which is really pretty stupid because this is a race for a million bucks. But they’re pretty, so whatever.

On the way to the Viking Longhouse, the Doctors see I Hate You Too struggling on the side of the road. The Doctors can smell the desperation on them and try to exchange information for the Express Pass. “Do you want the Pit Stop or not? Do you want it or not?” For who the heck knows what reason, I Hate You Too hold onto their grubby extra Express Pass that they are required to give away in the next two legs of the race. Wow. There’s stupid, and then there’s a whole new level of self-destructively nose-to-spite-the-face stupid.

Next week, a Double U-Turn.

Reprinted from TravelFreak.com