501 Places

El fin del mundo - what if there really was a world's end?

When our United Airlines flight from San Francisco touched down at Heathrow, 9 weeks after we had departed for Singapore, we had completed a full circuit of the globe. We had explored many exciting places, and returned home from the opposite direction. An epic journey for us, but we are among millions who have made a round the world trip, following in the footsteps of Phillias Fogg and finding adventure in charting our way around our spherical planet.

But what if the world was in fact flat? We would not have been able to fly from Auckland to Honolulu without falling off the edge and into eternal oblivion. A RTW trip would look very different. In fact the whole world of adventure travel might have created new hot destinations, while familiar favourites would be forgotten backwaters.

Here are three itineraries that might be popular in this two dimensional world (all ex-London):

1. Classic City Route: London – New York – Los Angeles – Rio – Cape Town – Sydney – Auckland – Tokyo – London

Classic City Route

2. The Remote Explorer: London – Nuuk – Fairbanks – Easter Island – Torres del Paine – Madagascar – Papua New Guinea – Kamchatka – Lapland – London

The Wilderness Explorer

3. The World Wonders Tour: London – Grand Canyon – Chichen Itza – Machu Picchu – Christ Redeemer Statue – Table Mountain – Ayers Rock – Angkor Wat – Taj Mahal – Petra – London

The World Wonders Tour

Clearly in the strange new world there would be a whole different set of airports to cope with the flights that have to negotiate the corners of the earth. There would also be some big winners in global (or rather flat) tourism: South America, Alaska, Japan and NE Russia. On the other hand the Mediterranean countries, most of Africa and the Caribbean would find it hard to persuade RTW travellers to make an inward detour to visit their attractions.

On the whole I am glad that we do live in a round world (don’t tell these guys) but I will be careful not to let this stop me from visiting some of the fascinating ‘corners’ of our planet.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 11:36 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.