Hmm I watched the Insider video again but I didn't hear them mentioning how many stops there were.
Looked at the timeline in closer detail, I'm now leaning towards the Athens-Rome-Bangkok-Hanoi routing.
Can no longer find Paul Frederiksen's original tweet, but
Plaidmoon's post was posted at 12:43am board time, or 12:43pm Hanoi time. "2 hours ago" means Paul posted the picture of
London/Logan with the fan dancers at 10:58am, taking into account Twitter's rounding mechanism. (Plaidmoon, do you live in the Pacific Time Zone?)
According to Google, it's 9min by taxi from Ly Thai To Garden to Quan Su Temple, 16min on foot to the ladder pick-up, 10min to the birdcage, 10min back, and 12min by taxi to Thong Nhat Park. Add 30min for getting lost and figuring out the ladder, and we're at
1h30 between the fan dancers and the Pit Stop.
Adding 1h30 to 10:58am fits perfectly with
Paradoxinee and Emily's account, which puts
the first few check-ins at around 12:30pm.
Emily's photo of Becca/Floyd and Matt/Redmond checking in was posted at 12:28pm.
To further corroborate these timings,
Brina2222's photo shows
London/Logan's ladder still waiting at 12:04pm.
The
weather also fits. We see puddles on the ground, but no rain except for a quick shot of a windscreen wiper in the taxi from the airport. There were thunderstorms in the morning stopping at 9:30am, and a short bout of light rain at 11:30am. If teams were racing before 9:30am they would have been drenched in rain rather than sweat!
Working backwards,
teams left the airport at around 10:13am for a 45min journey downtown. That fits better with a 9:59am Thai Airways arrival from Bangkok than a 7:34am Vietnam Airways arrival from Paris. Granted, the taxis would have had to speed a bit considering the time needed for customs and immigration.
This would also give us
Brooke/Scott's potential Athens-X-London-Hanoi itinerary, scheduled to arrive 1h20 earlier. By contrast, there is no flight arriving 1h15 before the Athens-Paris-Hanoi 6:20am arrival; the first flight into Hanoi that morning only arrives at 5:50am.
So even if we disregard the shot of the Thai Airways flight landing, it's
pretty darn likely teams took that flight in, on a Athens-Rome-Bangkok-Hanoi routing! (The earlier flights would have been booked out.)