RECAP: Mud wrestling. Dangerous monkeys. Eating raw rice. More twists and turns than a coiled king cobra.

In the first episode of its second season, Survivor NZ seemed out to prove it was stepping things up from the debut season.

It was a tightly-edited and action-packed hour-and-a-half of television. Above all it was ambitious, and while it didn't always live up to those ambitions, it was certainly an enthralling ride.

The episode started out with a series of shots aimed at establishing Thailand as a dangerous place. Dangerous snakes, dangerous spiders, dangerous tigers, dangerous monkeys.

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The contestants, 18 bundles of nerves and anticipation, landed on a bald little island in the middle of a lake near the Thai-Myanmar border.

Scott McAulay/SUPPLIED The 18 contestants will compete for $250,000 on Survivor New Zealand.

Host Matt Chisholm welcomed them to the game, and with no more ado they launched into a challenge for a mystery individual reward.

The challenge was classic Survivor: untie a bag full of numbered tiles, swim out to a floating pontoon with it, extract another bag from a box on the pontoon, swim back to shore, assemble the numbers in both bags in order from 1 to 100.

Supplied The first reward challenge involved arranging tiles in numerical order.

Pint-sized lifestyle journalist Franky was the surprise package, outswimming even the towering lads fellow contestant Renee described as "Greek gods", but Dutch audio producer Josefien was the winner.

She picked rocket engineer Matt - the challenge's runner-up - to share the mystery bounty with, but in the end handed him a poisoned chalice - their "prize" was being responsible for picking, schoolyard style, the members of the two tribes.

Supplied Challenges did not go well for the Chani tribe.

It was a spectacular conceit from the show's production team, forcing the contestants not just to evaluate each other based on first impressions, but to share those evaluations with all their competitors. Everyone was left clear on who were the top dogs and the strugglers at the bottom.

Jose's picks basically went in order of descending buff-ness, while Matt shook things up by going for 44-year-old mum Tara first off. Retail manager Dylan and journalist Karla were the last picks.

Once they'd been picked, the two tribes - the blue-buffed Chani and the yellow-buffed Khangkhaw - were ferried to separate islands to set up their camps. They constructed bamboo shelters and dug latrines, while sneaking off when nobody was looking to search for the immunity idols Chisholm had told them were in play earlier. Tribe Chani weren't long into building their shelter when they had the first medical incident of the season, with Karla slicing her fingers with their machete.

Supplied Members of the Khangkhaw trib.

Khangkhaw worked well together, but over at Chani the hut-building played second fiddle to political negotiations. Auckland account manager JT emerged as the early contender for season Machiavelli, negotiating a voting block within hours of landing on the island.

Neither team was able to get a fire going by rubbing sticks together, but tribe Khangkhaw had the brainwave to leave some rice soaking overnight so they could eat a few crunchy handfuls the next morning.

The next morning it was time for another reward challenge - this time the prize was revealed beforehand as a tool kit containing tarpaulins, a hammer and nails, and crucially, a fire-starting flint.

Supplied The second reward challenge devolved into a mud wrestle.

Chisholm described the challenge as a "doozie", and he was right. Production had buried heavy bags in a muddy field, which the contestants had to dig out and return to the start line. It was, basically, a great big mud wrestle. Social worker Kaysha established herself as a ruthless competitor, taking down two other competitors so her teammate Tess could sprint to the finish.

Supplied Social worker Kaysha proved a strong contender in the mud wrestling.

Khangkhaw dominated and took home the tools - meaning they feasted on fluffy rice that evening while Chani tried, without success, to cook theirs in the sun. During the afternoon of day two a voting block began to form in the previously harmonious Khangkhaw, with Dylan and Kaysha conspiring to take out a group they described as "lads on a camping trip" - Matt, accountant Josh and PE teacher Brad.

Their negotiations weren't needed; Khangkhaw won the next day's immunity challenge, a convoluted affair played out on a kind of bamboo playground that got an A for effort on the part of production, but actually wasn't as good to watch as either of the preceding events.

Supplied The third challenge involved an elaborate bamboo jungle gym.

Thus it was Chani who headed to Tribal Council that evening - shot in a pretty spectacular cave - and Chani who voted out their "captain", Josefien. Jose got five votes to Karla's four.

Supplied Tribal Council took place inside a cave.

How the tribe actually came to this decision is, unfortunately, a bit of a mystery. The only footage of the negotiations that led to this decision showed Franky, Renee and pharmacist Dave talking about voting off their weakest person to give them a better shot at winning challenges. They pretty heavily implied the knives were out for Karla.

In the end, they voted off someone who was probably their strongest player in challenges, which seems a pretty radical about-face. Perhaps we'll find out how it all came about next week, but for now that was the sole thing missing in an episode that delivered everything else you want from Survivor.

Supplied Josefien was voted out by the tribe she'd hand-picked.

Finally, some awards:

Best hat: This was perhaps the most fiercely contended challenge of the whole show, with JT's custom-made Ashhurst flap-cap (a reference to his hometown in Manawatū) only narrowly fending off Matt's weathered bucket hat.

TVNZ JT's custom-made Ashhurst sunhat wins the coveted best hat award.

Most dedicated fire starter: Take a bow Dave, who managed to give himself some gnarly blisters attempting to get a blaze going without a flint.

Most unrealistic wildlife shot: The tiger. If these guys so much as sniff a tiger throughout their time in the bush, I'll eat my hat.

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