25,000 mile is pretty WTF.
TAR 5 = 72,000 mile.
Joab, your estimate is not the remotest bit close to the real mileage for AR5. It appears that you are using either a World Race Productions source (notorious for overestimating the mileage of Amazing Races) or some other invalid source. Here are the statistics for each of the legs, using
www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/infopage/howfar.htm. I am going to approach this by separating out the air miles, which I will show as statute miles at the conversion factor of 1.15 statute miles/air mile, from the fairly small ground transportation segments, which will be in statue miles to start with. One approximation which will tend to understate the air miles is that real trips involve connections at airports not on the line between the origination and destination point. I have used connecting points in only a few instances where I know them.
Here are those segments:
Air Miles Statute Miles
1. Los Angeles to Montevideo 6182
Montevideo to Punta del Este 90
2. Punta del Este to Montevideo 90
Montevideo to Buenos Aires 150
3. Buenos Aires to San Carlos de Bariloche 857
4. San Carlos de Bariloche to Buenos Aires 947
5. Buenos Aires to St. Petersburg 8171
6. St. Petersburg to Cairo 2073
7. Cairo to Nairobi 2173
Nairobi to Kilimanjaro airport 100
Kilimanjaro to Mto Wa Mbu 100
8. Mto Wa Mbu to Kilimanjaro 100
Kilimanjaro to Nairobi 100
Nairobi to Dubai 2181
9. Dubai to Calcutta 2100
10. Calcutta to Auckland 5907
11Auckland 4922
12. Manila to El Nido Island 231
13. El Nido Island to Manila 231
Manila to Calgary 6862
Calgary to Banff 80
Banff to Calgary 80
Calgary to Denver 939
Denver to Dallas/Ft. Worth 658
DFW to Ft. Worth 25
That gives me a total of 43225 air miles, which is equivalent to 49709 statute miles. Direct statute miles from ground segments total 1924. The total in statute mile equivalents is 51633, more than 20,000 miles short of 72K.