Last episode showed us just how awful Lance & Keri are as racers, as partners, and as human beings. They trucked around Vietnam, making impossibly stupid errors at almost every turn, bickering ceaselessly, and fulfilling every ugly American stereotype. Seriously, it was bad. They just barely avoided elimination, with older odd couple Marcy & Ron getting the axe in their stead.

This week teams first had to fly from Ho Chi Minh City to Cambodia. At the airport the teams discovered that only one airline made the flight they needed, and that it didn't leave until noon the next morning, which meant that basically everyone would be tied again. Boo. But then the final two teams, Lance/Keri and Zev/Justin, couldn't get tickets on that flight, and they were stuck on another one, which left nearly two hours after the first. At the last moment both teams caught the plan, so all the drama was for naught. And Lance, ever the charmer, got off the transport bus to the plane flexing his guns and screaming "No cheap wins, bitches!" Ugh, that guy. Can we deport him somewhere? Anywhere?

The first stop in Cambodia was to find a "foreign assignment editor" and get their next direction from him by whispering a specific line. After the teams did that they were tasked with locating a hotel with a room named after a woman in an archival photo - a photo that was OBVIOUSLY of Jackie Onassis, who very few of the racers were able to identify. It was a real heartbreaker, since you figure "Amazing Race" contestants to be fairly intelligent among reality show cattle. Canaan of Mika/Canaan was especially bad, as he ID'd her as Queen Elizabeth (sigh), but it's not surprising since he was the only racer to screw up the assignment editor bit.

The teams were given a detour with two terrible options; one in which they had to sell bicycle helmets to any random family of four on the street by using their powers of persuasion, or another one in which they had to go to a market and get a scarf from a specific stall, then wander around the many aisles to locate a woman wearing the exact same scarf. The scarf challenge didn't seem too bad, although it did feature a weird scenario where the teams had to literally grab the poor scarf women and drag them to the clue-bearer. Almost everybody chose the scarves, except Lance/Keri. Of course. Of note, during the scarf challenge, Justin's Amazing Fannypack was WIDE OPEN, and stuff was bouncing around like crazy. That'll become important later.

Then the Roadblock forced one member of the team to learn how to be a monkey dancer, which is something that people apparently do in Cambodia. They had to put on a monkey mask and tail, then follow a Monkey Master and learn three kind of basic maneuvers (a crouching log walk, a balance beam thing, and then a monkey crawl). Didn't seem terribly hard. Zev and Justin were in first, and Zev took the challenge, having problems with the third skill. When Zev had a mini panic attack, he allowed Team Gay Bro to leap into first place.

Due to a slow motorized rickshaw vs. a regular taxi race to the finish, Sam/Dan last out on the win to Zev/Justin. However, big problems: after checking in and doing interviews, Zev discovered that his passport was missing. Since passports were required to go any further in the race, Phil informed them that if they did not produce them they would be DQ'd from the competition. Yikes! That would be the second couple I can think of that happening to, after Dallas and Toni a few seasons back after Dallas left their Amazing Purse in a Russian taxi.

Zev and Justin assumed that it must have been in the cab of their Cambodian taxi driver, and they just happened to have gotten the guy's business card (THAT was smart on their part). They called him and asked him to come back, and started re-tracing their steps.

In the end, Maria/Tiffany arrived in last, but avoided elimination for the second time because Zev/Justin couldn't find Zev's passport. Justin blamed himself, saying he was "prone to carelessness." But Zev was very sweet about it. And then they were eliminated. Sadness. I liked that team a lot, and that's a terrible way to go. And Maria & Tiffany narrowly avoided elimination again. That's pretty unsatisfying. But a good reminder: Don't lose your passport, folks!

Next week: Dubai, and all of the insane crazy rich things it has to offer. � � � �