First, I want to thank RFF's intrepid traveler and amazing renissance man, Neobie, for doing the map below.
I don't know for sure, but the only time I have known where the Sequestorville/Elimination Station was located BEFORE the date of the premier, was for TAR 16 in Puerto Vallarta. This was due to the tremendous popularity of Jeff and Jordan, crossovers from Big Brother. They had so many fans worldwide, someone spotted them in Mexico before the start of the race.
All the teams showing up in Miami on the same flight got me to thinking. How/why did they get there? I think that BVM tried a new tactic to keep us off the real final three and it apparently it worked. I have seen so much speculation on the final 3 with little to no evidence supporting it. Just lots of wish lists to me.
My speculation only:I think that the Elimination Station for TAR 18 was on the Mynmmar/Thai/Malaysian Pensula. Here are my reasons.
1) All the previous sequestorvilles and elimination stations have been in non-English speaking countries, so to me that rules out Australia.
2) All the known elimination points (Broken Hill, Tokyo/Yokohama, Kunming) and the two speculated elimination points (Kolkata and Varanasi) all circle the Mynmmar/Thai/Malaysian Pensula.
3) TAR has used this region before for this purpose in other races, TAR 5 and TAR 14 and very close in TAR15. Phu Qouc Island (TAR 15) is just across the Gulf of Thailand from Ko Samui (TAR 14)
4)Two of the 4 west to east races have used this area. TAR13 had 3 teams eliminated in S America, so the other two came back to Mexico. Strange to me that TAR 10 had Porto, Portugal as the sequestorville, but it was easy, quick hop to get to New York from there for the finale.
5) Using the Phuket Airport, which is centrally located on that pensula, it is easy to get to Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. All three of these airports have very easy connections to Johannesburg and from there to Sao Paulo. The ES could have been in Malaysia or Singapore too....really anywhere from Bangkok to Singapore seems to be the target area that I propose. They could have flown back through Sydney or Auckland too, but by flying that way adds about 4-8 hours onto flying time to Sao Paulo over the route through Johannesburg, South Africa.
Here is a graphic for what I think happened.....again thanks and credit to Neobie for the graphic.