"Amazing Race" host Phil Keoghan acknowledges that the show took a misstep with last fall's family edition, in which the Emmy-winning series eschewed its globe-trotting escapades for a race that featured more players -- teams of four, instead of two -- but stayed entirely within North America.

"We tried something, and I'm really proud of the fact that we did," he says. "I think if we hadn't, people might have criticized us for not being adventurous and doing something different." Still, "people clearly made a statement that they wanted the international element to the show. They missed it."

Indeed, after several seasons of rising ratings, "The Amazing Race: Family Edition" failed to keep the trend going. It drew an average of about 10.8 million viewers per week, compared to 13 million and 11.5 million for the two competitions that aired last season.

So for the ninth edition of "The Amazing Race," which debuts Tuesday (Feb. 28) on CBS, the show is returning to its roots, which Keoghan succinctly describes as "less faces, more places."

"For me personally, I think [reaction to the family edition] showed the places are as much a star in the show as the people," Keoghan says. "People missed that exotic, fish-out-of-water element where [contestants] are completely and utterly dumbfounded as to what to do because of culture shock or language barriers."

As if to underscore the break from the previous show, this race almost immediately leaves the continent. From the Red Rocks amphitheater outside Denver, the 11 teams fly to Sao Paulo, Brazil; Keoghan says later episodes will take them to Sicily, Russia and the Middle East. In all, the teams -- and the crew, including Keoghan -- traveled some 60,000 miles in just 29 days, the most distance the show has covered in that amount of time.

Covering that much ground in that little time can make for some logistical headaches, particularly if the teams are widely separated. Keoghan won't say if it happened in this race, but in the past, there have been times when he's arrived at the end of a leg only moments before the first-place team.

"This is the thing that people forget: If the spread of the teams is close to the 12 hours of the pit stop, I'm there for the first team and there for the last," he says. "There are times when I don't have any major lead over the first teams, and times where I cant get to all the locations before getting to the pit stop ahead of them.

"So I'll go to the pit stop to be there before them, then backtrack on the preceding leg to shoot the Detour, then try to leap ahead for the Detour or Roadblock on the next leg."

For all the ping-ponging around he has to do, though, it's clear Keoghan still loves the job, and he readily ticks off a few places he'd like the show to go in the future: Mongolia, Bhutan, Nepal, the interior of Africa.

"A lot of it has to do with logistics, getting to some of the more remote places in the world with all the people we have and doing it safely and efficiently," he says. "I hope we can get to some of those places. But if we can't do it on the race, I'll do it personally."