“Rocking Back and Forth and Foaming at the Mouth” – Reality News Online’s Interview with The Amazing Race 19's Jenna & Ethan

Because of the popularity of Ethan & Jenna, we were unable to do our usual one-on-two interview with them. Instead, they did a larger group interview. To make sure you get all that they had to say, we’re including everything here – but we’ve specifically labeled which questions were ours, and we had a lot of ‘em! On with the interview!

Reality News Online: Hi Jenna & Ethan, thanks for talking to me today.

Jenna & Ethan: Hi!

Q: In the first leg, how long did the Confucius Roadblock really take everyone to do?

Ethan: For some people that took forever! It was on a crappy, old payphone. It was all crackly, there’s traffic going by, so you’re kneeling down, blocking one ear. What they didn’t show you is, from the phone to Confucius you had to walk 75 to 100 yards to get to him.

I think where everyone stumbled – where I stumbled – is the guy who was saying it on the phone, his accent was so strong you couldn’t hear him say the difference between preparation and preparations.

It probably took me an hour to finish.

Jenna: No, it didn’t take you an hour – we actually caught up with a lot of people there.

Ethan: Yeah, we did pass four teams in that challenge, but it took a while. I was up there, truthfully, like 11 or 12 times. Also, you needed a phone card. All the clue said was to make a call on the pay phone, so everyone was trying to figure out how to make a call. Then everyone sprinted to the nearest convenience store, bought a phone card, came back – and then if the phone card ran out you had to get another one.

Q: What was it like spelunking in that Indonesian cave?

Ethan: It was fun! You just felt like you were going back in time because you rappel off this thing and you’re in the middle of this jungle and you land – and it was really muddy when you got down there. The second you landed everyone was slipping all over the place.

Then you run back into this cave and there’s this guy playing a gong and it was candle lit. So it was fun. It was like you were an Indiana Jones treasure hunter.

RNO: In this past leg, the teams were clumped together getting off the train. What happened between the station and the Roadblock that split the teams up so much?

Jenna: We had a really bad taxi driver. Actually, there was also a challenge you guys didn’t see that actually split the teams into two groups.

RNO: Can you tell us a bit about that challenge?

Jenna: Yes. [From the train station] we were told to go to this hotel. We had to jump in the cabs and the cabs took us to a hotel. When you got there you had to grab a key and you were either in the first group or the second group leaving the hotel (at two specific times). The groups were, like, 20 minutes apart.

That’s when everyone got their taxi driver that you had to keep the entire leg… And that’s when we, unfortunately, got into the wrong cab.

Q: How much time did Jenna’s forgetting your clue to the orphanage cost you?

Jenna: I actually wrote down what was on the clue and put it in the bottom of our bag before we went to that challenge. I left the clue with our clothes. We didn’t think it was a big deal because we already had it written down, which was why I was asking Ethan where he put the piece of paper. It was in the bottom of our bag so we went back and got the clue. It took, maybe, a minute? A minute and a half total?

Ethan: It was like going to the mail box.

Jenna: Like the shortest trip ever.

RNO: So that probably didn’t have an effect on your standings?

Jenna: No. It didn’t have an effect at all. The reason we went from [about] fourth to checking in ninth [at the Pit Stop the first time] was because of the taxi driver.

Q: Why did you decide to do the Money Maker Detour option?

Jenna: Because we figured that the Ticket Taker people would all be trying to get the same cars. Meanwhile, when you did the Money Maker everybody got their own block – their own street corner.

Ethan: And Jenna’s a really good dancer.

RNO: When you got to the orphanage, did you notice there was a sign on the table?

Jenna: Yes. Basically, in our clue – and we’re always told to go by our clues – it said to turn in all rupees –

Ethan: From the dancing challenge.

Jenna: From the dancing challenge. When we got to the challenge, it wasn’t underlined or marked in red. Also, it wasn’t marked with any race flags. So it was just like any other sign. I figured it said turn in all your money you made and any additional money – so we actually turned in all of our additional rupees. On the clue – and I checked the clue – it didn’t say anything about your converted money. Everything that was said was about rupees. We only had about 20 dollars that we didn’t convert.

Ethan: U.S. dollars.

Jenna: So we did turn in all our additional rupees. We figured if we had gotten it wrong, we wouldn’t have gotten the clue – like on all other Race challenges. If you said the wrong word to the Buddhist monk, he didn’t give you the clue. If you don’t do a challenge right, you don’t get the clue. Maybe other people missed that, but we [thought] we wouldn’t have gotten the clue if we got the challenge wrong.