This will not be a happy leg.

Slap So are we honoring the crew of the B52 that went down, or are we celebrating the fact that they crashed? As with Vennui's note above, there are people who stand ready to take any reminder of the war as a personal affront, and there are those in Vietnam who will make sure it is a personal affront. I'm hardly expecting the relationship to be sister cities and Thanks For The Agent Orange, but there's just too much waiting to go wrong here.

Yes, I'm very aware that the same thing can be invoked on the States when the course goes through Hiroshima. And then some.

Slap The purpose of Vietnamese food: to make the locals realize how desperately they need to get out of the country as soon as they taste anything else... can't call that on Production? Okay, so how about this one: the soup branch was an open invitation to theft by the merchants. We saw a bit of Ugly Easterners last night: fingers on the scale, hand over the wrong items to the witless fools, rip them off and if they want to complain about it, good luck finding someone who'll care. It gets worse if the teams were paying for the stuff out of their own leg money, giving the chess piece haulers a financial advantage later in the course. Don't give non-participants that much influence over the race.

Slap The chess piece placement was partially a war of attrition, giving later-arriving teams a small edge in searching through a smaller field. If you have to replace the sandcastles, then someone should have been keeping the number of costumed extras constant.

Slap Standards of performance for the bamboo dance were... oh, right: we never heard or saw any. Thanks.

Clap For not dangling food in front of the shark by turning this into a double elimination leg. (As opposed to your Wednesday night sibling, which is still at the point of encouraging mental breakdowns for extra drama and casts people who'll make sure they get a few.) My only question heading into the mat was 'Speed Bump or not?', and leaving it out was appropriate.

Slap Hours. Of. Non. Operation. Did we really need a giant bunch point at the end of a giant bunch point? No. Did we get one? Naturally. And why? No one knows.