Last Wednesday night modelling coach and former Bajau member Amanda Beck was snuffed out of Malaysia after she failed to secure an alliance with anyone from the former Iban crowd.
Angela and her gal pal Amanda flipped from aligning with Angie to aligning with Lorette and ended up outnumbered when Lorette unsurprisingly stuck with an Immune Angie.
I caught up with Angela to ask why she shortsightedly ditched the Angie-alliance and to find out more about her being preggers on the island:
Tashi: Congrats on getting married and your upcoming baby!
Angela: Thank you - we’re very, very excited. We can’t wait for January now - since I found out that’s been my main focus obviously - John and now our baby. We went for our scan last week and it’s so cute - you can see the face and the cheeks and eyes and – so now we want to see what the baby looks like compared to the scan.
Tashi: Is it a boy or girl?
Angela: We don’t know - we’re keeping it as a surprise.
Tashi: Do you have any names lined up?
Angela: If it’s a boy we’re going to stick to John for family tradition - so it’ll probably be John Edward and if it’s a girl we’re thinking along the lines of Michaela or Kaylee or something like that.
Tashi: Well done on managing to survive for two instead of one.
Angela: (laughs) Ja thanks - when I look back at the show and watching the episodes now - I think ”I’m there, I’m there and I’m three weeks pregnant,” - it’s weird to think.
Tashi: Did you feel different?
Angela: Well I was very tired and I felt bad ‘cos I was sleeping the best out of everybody and kept thinking “How can that be?” Now looking back my body obviously just shut down. Everyone wouldn’t sleep at night but I only couldn’t sleep when the rats came too close or whatever.
Other than that - when I got back I had a little bit of morning sickness for about two days which I put down to my body re-adjusting etc and once I found out what it
really was … until then I had logical explanations for everything.
Tashi: When you got voted off - the opportunity was right there for you to swing things with Angie. You and Amanda were so thrilled with your plan - why were you so quick to throw it away? I know Angie stole food but you had a guaranteed vote with her.
Angela: But we also had a guaranteed vote with Mandla and Lorette. When Angie approached us the day before Tribal Council it would have been a three-three vote. Then when Lorette came to us the next day she said her and Mandla would vote for us for Angie it would have been four against two. If we’d gone three-three we might have ended up in the situation that happened with Lorette and Hein and been down again whereas with a four-two vote it couldn’t happen.
Tashi: Of course they weren’t loyal to you because immediately Angie was up for Immunity they targeted you.
Angela: Yes well obviously they couldn’t vote for Angie and I knew that Mandla, Grant and Lorette were very, very close. I saw that in our tribe after the shuffle. They were almost inseperable - once Angie won immunity Amanda and I knew one of our heads were on the chopping block. We tried to wangle something - we even went looking for the immunity idol, we tried speaking to Lorette but I knew she wasn’t going to vote for Mandla or Grant.
Tashi: Why didn’t you try to convince Mandla to vote for Grant with what you said about Grant being a snake in the grass?
Angela: We tried speaking to Mandla but he wasn’t very reactive to voting for him - at a stage he said he’d think about it but nothing came of it because they’d formed such a base. We tried speaking to all of them but the best reactions we got was Angie against Lorette and Lorette against Angie - and Mandla just sort of went with however his previous alliance was going.
Tashi: Do you think he’s made a mistake not targeting Grant?
Angela: They’re both strong players so you could say he’s made a mistake and that Grant’s made a mistake not targeting him. At the end of the day they’re still in the game and I’m not.
Tashi: In Go Extra you mentioned that you think Grant might have lost the Immunity Challenge so Angie could win. He knows how untrustworthy she is - why would he do that?
Angela: If you look at his private interview before the challenge he said she would be the best to take to the final two because of her flipping and it would be seen as a negative thing for her at the final Tribal Council.
Tashi: Are you convinced he threw it?
Angela: On the day I was wondering but seeing the episode and how they looked at each other makes me feel, “You know what - he actually did.” He wanted to keep his alliance together because it’s a guarantee for him.
Tashi: Remember right at the beginning he got a vote from someone but we didn’t see who gave it to him - do you know who it was?
Angela: I heard from one of the press publications somewhere that it was Lisa but I wasn’t there so I didn’t even know he got a vote at the time. Ven after the merge I didn’t know eh’d gotten a vote.
Tashi: Was there anyone you trusted?
Angela: At the beginning you try to suss everybody out so I put out a lot of information to see if it came back to me from a different party. For example Amanda came to me and said: “Why don’t we do a girl alliance?” A good idea as it is - you need brawn - women can only do so much, there were a lot of challenges where you really needed physical strength so I took the info and told Rijesh: “This is what Amanda” said and it wasn’t an option for him.
Then I heard through Dyke that Rijesh had said the same thing to him but said: “Let’s go into a guy alliance.” That’s when I found out Rijesh was being such a snake and also overhearing him speak - he promised me, he promised Amanda, he promised Dyke the same thing. I kept putting out a strategic idea that I knew wouldn’t work and then kept seeing who came back with it to work out who was talking to who and creating alliances.
Tashi: By the end was there anyone you trusted completely?
Angela: Amanda and I - by the end I trusted her 100%. When we first made the alliance before the shuffle we were giving each other information all the time about what we were doing. Then after the shuffle we couldn’t speak and as soon as we got back together after the merge I gave her my information and she gave me hers and we kept each other motivated a lot.
You have some very negative days, where you really feel down and I found that those days she helped me and I helped her where she would be crying or I would be crying. By the end I trusted her through and through and she’s probably one of the few I’ll keep in contact with after the game.
Tashi: So you chose your alliance based on friendship?
Angela: No not really, it was more who gave me back the most honest information so it didn’t start out as a friendship but it ended up as one.
Tashi: Did you trust Dyke and Hein in your alliance?
Angela: At the beginning I thought to myself: “What is Dyke doing? How is this man thinking?” But then I thought that we all come from different backgrounds, we don’t know what community he comes from so I thought, “You know he just seems to blab his mouth,” he just doesn’t know when to keep quiet and you need to in the situation so my trust wasn’t there at the beginning but as I got to know him a little bit better I think I started to trust him more.
With Hein - from speaking to him and interacting with him I started to get to know him more and I trusted him almost 100% - he was who he was - he told me about his life and he seemed very genuine.
Tashi: As far as I can work out things came down to the guys against the girls because
Hein said the reason they chose to vote for Lorette was because they wanted to get the guys one up.
Angela: The logic they told us for voting for Lorette was that if us four - in my alliance - had to go up against the former Iban tribe, Amanda and I had a better chance of beating Angie than Lorette. They could always take out Grant and Mandla in a later stage - that’s what they figured physically - but with us, Lorette’s a very formidable force to be reckoned with when it comes to strength. Up until then she’d gotten a lot further than any of the girls in the challenges - that was the reason they gave us for it.
Tashi: You’d automatically assume they’d go for Mandla first because you were all up against him.
Angela: It’s a very valid point you bring up because the reason they gave us was that the girls wouldn’t possibly be able to beat Lorette physically - we’d have a better chance against Angie - but now that you’ve said the male thing it makes sense.
Tashi: Yes Mandla's been much more of a physical competitor for everyone than Lorette in the challenges.
Angela: I never thought about that - the puzzle just gets deeper and more complex. I’ll find out all these answers on the final night hopefully when I can say: “Hey what was your strategy actually?”
Tashi: Did you have any dreams or nightmares in your sleeps?
Angela: I did have a couple of dreams, not nightmares but in my first dream I dreamt of a Steers burger wrapped in Glad wrap
floating towards the shore.
One of the others I had, I remember thinking, “Jeez, I don’t know what’s going on.” I had this dream that I walked into a shop to buy a newspaper and the newspaper guy - I gave him money for it, and instead of it being like twenty pages or whatever it was only two pages and he shortchanged me. Looking back now it was probably the shortage of information that works on your subconscious - you don’t know what the others are thinking or saying - other than that it was a dead sleep.
Tashi: What was your most exciting moment?
Angela: I think winning Rezki - I know it’s quite a controversial issue - but by then the Steers burgers were floating to shore too often in my dreams and I was dying for some meat - I’m not really a fish person. That for me - being able to eat that - it took away that craving for meat the most out of everything so it was high point.
Tashi: Who do you think’s most likely to make a million bucks outside of the show?
Angela: Surprisingly, as much as people say she talks too much, Amanda ‘cos she knows how to talk around situations. Other than that Hein - I think that would come from his Survival school that he wants to do - people really enjoyed seeing him doing his thing out there so I think he would have a very good chance - probably better than Amanda - of making a million out of the show.
Tashi: Who’s most likely to be in another TV show?
Angela: Um - I know Hein doesn’t really enjoy it - maybe Lorette, in a detective, investigative story. Maybe Grant in a lawyers story of how lawyers can speak their way through things and maybe Amanda because she’s very talkative and outgoing and they usually look for bubbly personalities. Maybe a talk show or possibly a presenting show.
Tashi: Who’s most likely to get married next?
Angela: I know Dyke was talking to me about proposing to his girlfriend but that was only next year I think. Other than that - see I didn’t know Irhsaad very well, I didn’t know Nonfundo, I didn’t know Viwe, Nicola’s married, Hein’s married, I don’t think Angie ‘cos she doesn’t have a boyfriend at this stage from what I knew so either Dyke or Amanda because they’ve got long standing relationships already.
Ends