The remotest place on Earth

[Deleted]

Very little of the world's land can now be thought of as inaccessible, according to a new map of connectedness.

The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water.

The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks. It also considers how factors like altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel.

Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10% of the world's land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city.

What's more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20% of the land is more than two days from a city - around the same proportion as Canada's Quebec province.

After much calculation, it's official: the world's most remote place is on the Tibetan plateau -->
(34.7°N, 85.7°E).

From here, says Andy Nelson, a former researcher at the European Commission, it is a three-week trip to the cities of Lhasa or Korla - one day by car and the remaining 20 on foot.

Rough terrain and an altitude of 5200 metres also lend it a perfect air of "Do Not Disturb".

[bixaorellana]

Do people live there? And what do the dark & light areas of the maps mean?

[Deleted]

The darker the color, the more isolated in terms of travel time.

[bixaorellana]

Hm. Greenland is not exactly a hotbed of travel activity, either.

[Deleted]

But I presume that it is dark mostly because of the distances to cover and no roads -- Tibet is dark because the terrain is so difficult.

[suzanneschuelke]

Also (because I've looked into going to Greenland) there is really nothing that qualifies as a city in Greenland. You need to go to Newfoundland or Iceland to get to a city of the size that they are defining. The entire population of Greenland is only 57,000 (I just looked it up to make sure I wasn't making a fool of myself and there was a city of 50,000 - but there isn't.

[fumobici]

Here's a similar map from 1881! It wouldn't fit in my flatbed scanner so please excuse the distortion as well as the size. Interesting how things have changed.

[suzanneschuelke]

Great 1881 map. Thanks!!!

[Deleted]

The green "within 10 days" area is probably not totally accurate. I would think that some of northern Scandinavia required more effort, especially in the winter.

But the map makes me smile to think of how trips must have been planned in those days. "Let's see. It will take 40 days to go to Australia and 40 days to get back. If I spend 3 months there, I should block a six month period on next year's calendar for my holiday."

[bixaorellana]

Yes, more days for some, fewer for others.

Susanne -- 57,000! Wow. When you consider there's a US Air Force Base there which artificially swells the population, it's a tiny core population indeed.

That's such a evocative point about travel, Kerouac. "Travel" necessarily meant "journey" for much of human history, whereas if I want to "travel" from N.America to Europe now, I'll be there in less than a day. What's amazing is what those travelers dragged along, too. Not only were clothes more cumbersome then, but the better-heeled travelers had servants, bathtubs, full linen and tableware services, etc. etc.

Travel even within a single country could be so time consuming and arduous that it made for very long stays by our standards, once you got where you were going.

[spindrift]

I've just found this thread! I'd like to travel slowly around the Tibetan plateau but the Chinese won't allow it. Such a trek would be my idea of fun.

[suzanneschuelke]

I want to go to Greenland - but unfortunately it would probably only be overnight (from Iceland). Even that is quite expensive - but how can you get that close and not go? Not this year - but maybe next.

[Deleted]

I really wish that travel were not so fast now. The idea of being in New York or London and being able to be in Tokyo less than 14 hours later is obscene.

This is perhaps one of the only parts of life in which I would like to return to 19th century norms. Travel should be a slow transition across a multitude of cultures, not a hop from one McDonald's to the next.

[suzanneschuelke]

I just calculated how long it would take to get around the world on commercially schedule airlines. From my home airport it is under 39 hours:

20-Feb Leave Detroit 21:55
21-Feb Arrive Amsterdam 11:40
21-Feb Leave Amsterdam 17:40
22-Feb Arrive Tokyo 11:40
22-Feb Leave Tokyo 14:35
22-Feb Arrive Detroit 12:15

The two 11:40s are a coincidence - not a mistake. And all of these flights are far enough part to meet connection rules - assuming anyone was crazy enough to want to do it.

[spindrift]

When I trekked into Lo Manthang, Upper Mustang, Nepal I was in a remote place. It took us 5 days to walk over the mountains on paths, no roads.

I hear the Chinese have recently started to blast a road into the area.

[bixaorellana]

Feb 3, 2010 19:04:33 GMT kerouac2 said:

[Travel] is perhaps one of the only parts of life in which I would like to return to 19th century norms.

I don't think you'd even have to go back that far. If you could time travel only as far back as the mid-twentieth century, you'd probably find lots of opportunity for slow and/or adventurous travel. It's frustrating to think what has passed away only during our lifetimes. And it's not because it was replaced with something "better" in many cases. There are vistas and routes that will never be seen again from the vantage point of no-longer-functioning passenger trains -- trains which provided jobs and also cheaper transportation.

[Deleted]

In the mid-20th century, there were already air routes to most places, even if the planes only flew once every two weeks. I'm thinking more of just steamers and trains, where you get off and stay somewhere for 4 or 5 days whether you want to or not...

In my last ocean crossing in February 1973, even though the trip from New York to Cannes only lasted 8 days (via Gibraltar and Naples), there were the most fascinating people to meet on that ship.

[bixaorellana]

~ ? ~
You deny the possibility of slow travel in the mid-fifties, then cite a case of pleasantly slow travel in 1973.

[Deleted]

It's just that I think that slow travel is somewhat meaningless when you are just going slow yourself but the rest of the world is not. I can walk to Moscow in a couple of months, but I can also be there in three hours by plane -- that destroys most of the charm to me.

The last time I went to Vietnam, all of the French, Belgians, Swiss and Luxembourgers consulted the latest arrival from that area about what the latest voting was on a popular reality show. "So-and-so got kicked out? Wow!" Now of course they would not even do that due to the availability of streaming video.

[bixaorellana]

Yes, but since we can't travel back in time, the only way we are ever going to get any of that experience is to make our own slow travel.

And even the incursions of the modern world can be part of the experience. One of my favorite memories was of being on a park bench in San Cristobal, Chiapas in 1997. I was due to take a bus, but had to leave the hotel to keep from paying another day. I dozed off on the bench, then awoke because I felt eyes on me. It was a young Mayan woman, dressed traditionally and with a baby on her back. She was selling the EZLN dolls and was bored. After we dispensed with the usual where-are-you-from chit chat, it turned out we were fans of the same Mexican soap opera, about which we had an animated conversation.

Sometimes you don't have to go far to get off the beaten path, either. Remember ExistentialCrisis's wonderful picture story of crossing Canada by train? There are parts of the state of Guerrero in Mexico that, once you get into them, require time and resourcefulness to wend your way out again.

It's true that the era of Phileas Fogg is forever closed to us, but so is Paris in the 1890s, Berlin in the 20s, etc. It's also true you're less likely to die of a burst appendix, say, while pleasure traveling nowadays.

[Deleted]

Very true. But I am still nostalgic. If I could choose my travel epoch, it would probably be something like 1880. Travel was already "civilized" then, but it still took a very long time to get around the world. Maybe even up until around 1930 might have suited me.

It's really hard to know, isn't it?

[bixaorellana]

I was trying to be practical and realistic, but honestly understand and share your harkening back to when travel was really travel. As a woman, I would pick sometime after the first world war, when clothes were less cumbersome and intrepid women could travel alone.
Here ~~ you'll might want to peruse this before you hop into your

[Deleted]

You mean you wouldn't want to travel with 5 hat boxes in addition to the steamer trunks?

[bixaorellana]

There was a lot of that, but some of the early women travelers were eager to leave behind the world they knew. This will leave you wanting to know more: www.womeninworldhistory.com/essay-07-07.html