Someone Mapped the World's Longest Plausible End-to-End Hike

Start walking. Keep walking. What’s the longest path you can take?

Turns out, it is hella long — like take-a-year-off-from-work long.

It starts in West Africa, on Liberia’s Atlantic coast. Walk straight. You’ll hit water again in 8,400 miles later, on the bank of the East China Sea.

Reminder: This is not a real trail people take— it’s just the path you would walk, if you walked straight for as long as possible. Unlike the similarly long — but nowhere near as straight — Great Trail in Canada (which also has the advantage of being an actual trail), this “path” crosses some exceptionally dangerous territory — including but not limited to Libya, Iraq, Niger, and a bunch of other countries with extant State Department warnings. Plus live-fire zones. Plus an awful lot of China.

In a world, though, when it seems like all adventures have already been done, this would be one incredible experience.

Meet your guide

Diane Rommel

Diane Rommel has written for The Wall Street Journal, Outside, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Travel + Leisure, Wallpaper and Afar, as well as The Cut, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and McSweeney’s. She once drove from London to Mongolia, via Siberia.