Board Thread:Manga/@comment-5774380-20170208210026/@comment-26932251-20170209022858

" Did we have any reason to believe that now it was smooth sailing to the coast? The Titans cannot possibly be exterminated in Wall Maria, they've had five years to infest that territory. And the territory between Wall Maria and the coast was not an issue?"

I think it's possible. Judging by the owl's commentary, the population of dumb dumbs in all of Paradis probably was perhaps in the four figures. They made it sound like the Titan guillotine at Trost was running around the clock, let's assume very conservatively that the Titan Guillotine could only strike even just four times in 24 hours (they were using horses to lift up that giant log). Even at that rate, the kill count is over 1000 titans in nine months.

Now, for sake of argument, if we up the guillotine to one kill every hour, add in all the titans that were killed by other things such as the Survey Corps and I presume when the trio cleared the area around Shiganshina, then yeah, it's completely plausible that if the population of dumb dumbs in all of existence is under 10k, then yeah...

And you notice in the few shots we see of the Survey Corps' expedition, they aren't apparently even in a proper long distance scouting formation and it seems like they knew where to go.

"TL;DR" It's all plausible.