It's possible islands could have been the original idea - it's too bizarre not to have been when every location except one was an island - but that it was changed to something like cluegivers if Morocco was an emergency leg or something. With the big jump from Malta to Singapore, it seems possible the original route could have been straight from Copenhagen to Palermo, and then from Malta to... whichever of Bahrain or Qatar is the island, I always get them mixed up... to Singapore.