Amazing Race 9 spotted inside and outside the continental United States

Production began last month on The Amazing Race 9, and there’s good news for everyone who thinks this current season has been a North and Central America-centric catastrophe. (Stop reading now if you consider location information to be a spoiler.)

The race has been spotted outside the US, specifically in northern Australia. The Northern Territory News reports that “teams were rushed through Darwin airport to SkyCity hotel casino on Thursday night and yesterday morning they are believed to have filmed scenes at Darwin’s Crocodylus Park before being whisked to a secret location.” That would have been on Nov. 24, Thanksgiving, and Nov. 25, the day the rest of us were assaulting our neighbors so we could save 35 cents on a DVD player.

A team was later spotted in Adelaide on Nov. 27 on their way to Sydney. The team, “young, good-looking Americans carrying only backpacks, with a TV crew filming their every move,” was spotted at the airport in Adelaide “attempt[ing] to book a capacity Singapore Airlines flight,” according to The Advertiser. “They had boarding passes for a flight to Sydney, and after being told the Singapore Airlines flight was full, they ran back to the domestic terminal….”

Reader Andrew breaks down the dates and locations, using that funny backwards date notation thing non-Americans do:

23/11 – filming at Rottnest Island Prison (near Perth)
24/11 – arrived in Darwin, went to Skycity hotel
25/11 – went to crocodile park
28/11 – “desperate-looking” couple running around airport in Adelaide

Separately, the Salt Lake City Tribune managed to get Phil to confirm that the series was filming “somewhere near the Middle East,” although it’s not clear if the interview was conducted before or after the Australia sightings.

The race may have started in Denver, where the Denver Post ran a photograph of teams running through the airport on Nov. 7. A Reality TV World forum poster reproduced the photo and the caption from the paper:

“CBS cameramen for ‘The Amazing Race’ film two race participants Monday as they pass through Denver International Airport. The ninth installment of the reality TV show, which pits teams in an around-the-world race, starts in Colorado and is expected to air in the spring.”