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| Great circle route around the world starting from Budapest and passing through China, Oceania and South America |
In
a previous post, I put together an itinerary to go round the world in
thirty-seven days. The itinerary was then successfully implemented
in a virtual world tour lasting from the 8th
April to the 15th
May 2013.
I received some criticism, however, for my very “loose”
interpretation of the notion of going around the world. My world tour
could be considered a circumnavigation of the earth only in one
sense: namely, that I arrived back to my starting point after
crossing every line of longitude of the planet. It did not fulfil two
other criteria that one may expect of a circumnavigation: First, the
length of the route did not add up to the circumference of the earth
(the whole journey covered around 34.000 km as opposed to 40.000 km,
the approximate length of the equator). Second, I came nowhere close
to reaching the antipode, i.e. the exact opposite point of my
starting place at the other side of the earth; in my case, this would
have been in the Southern Pacific, but I did not even leave the
northern hemisphere during my journey.
