"Amazing Race" host Phil Keoghan. (Handout)

Take the worst airport experience you've ever had, multiply it by 10, and you probably still haven't endured half the hardship that Phil Keoghan has in the past nine years.

Getting paid to travel the world isn't as amazing as it sounds, says Keoghan, whose gig as the globe-trotting host of The Amazing Race has been anything but glam.

"I've been held by immigration overnight in Ukraine and barely made it to the pit stop on time because I didn't have the right papers," says Keoghan, who we caught on the phone during a rare moment of relaxation in L.A.

"I've missed flights, and my bag's gone missing and been chewed up in some kind of bag dispenser machine and somebody picked through the bag and took a few things out of it. Inevitably, my bag goes missing about once a season. I've been a little sick every now and again, sunburned on the scalp from extreme heats and shivered my biologicals off in Poland once outside in the cold.

"I think a lot of people would be surprised about how we operate."

The shooting for Season 17 of CBS' still-popular Amazing Race (which also airs on CTV) was no different from the rest. Keoghan says the production crew and the Racers didn't get to a hotel for the first six days of the 23 they spent travelling and taping.

"The schedule was brutal -- our sleep came from being on planes," says Keoghan, who became accustomed to washing his hair on the side of the road that week.

And then there was the watermelon incident. While completing a Leg 1 slingshot challenge with her partner Brook in England, home shopping host Claire launched her melon backward. Oops.

"Not in a million years did we see that watermelon was going to somehow reverse trajectory and fly back in her face," Keoghan says. "We test everything over and over again. We're not about wanting to injure people; that's the last thing we want to do. And it just so happened that she got a good smack in the face with that watermelon."

Thankfully, there are no other accidents to report so far this season, though Michael (partnered with his YouTube sensation son Kevin) suffered from heatstroke in Ghana, and the teams are going to freeze their butts off on a future leg in the Arctic Circle.

"They fly literally from the furnace to the freezer," Keoghan says. "Those kinds of shock treatments for them always work and always create great drama ... That's what is so much fun to document for us, because some of them just can't cope."

And the fans eat it up. Since its 17th season premiered last month, The Amazing Race re-assumed its spot in Canada's Top 10 for most-viewed TV shows, with last Sunday's Sweden episode pulling in an impressive 2.99 million viewers.

Like those who watch from the sidelines, Keoghan can't get enough. Despite the fact he has travelled to more than 100 countries, he says he still has much to see ("You would think I'd been to Nepal ... but I have not.") -- even if that means more lost luggage, bad weather and customs holdups.

"Put it this way: When you go on a vacation, and everything works perfectly, you talk less about that trip than you do about the trip where the hurricane came, and you had to huddle in the hotel and it was getting flooded and you met all of these people and you had to band together to survive.

"How boring would it be if I was to tell you that everything was perfect every single time and, 'Oh yes, I have a makeup person and a wardrobe person and the flights are always on time, the weather's always perfect and we have no hardships at all.' It wouldn't make for a very good story.

"If you get three hours of sleep a night, you think that's luxury. And if you do that for a month, you lose 12 pounds, you come back and you're exhausted mentally and physically ... And I wouldn't have it any other way."

lindsey.ward@sunmedia.ca