The longest journey you can make by land, counted in borders
Lesotho and Papua New Guinea are connected by land, but only just. Even by the shortest route, you cross 18 borders and pass through 17 countries to get from one to the other.
Pick any two countries connected by land and there is a shortest route between them, counted in borders crossed. France to Germany is one. France to Poland is two, through Germany. For most pairs of countries on the same continent the answer is under six. But some countries sit at opposite ends of the largest connected landmass on Earth, which stretches from the tip of southern Africa through the Middle East and Asia to the island of New Guinea.
We worked out the shortest route between every pair of countries that can be reached from each other by land. The most extreme answer is 18 borders. It happens twice, and both times one end is Lesotho.
Lesotho to Papua New Guinea
Lesotho is a small kingdom entirely surrounded by South Africa, so every journey out of it starts there. Papua New Guinea shares the island of New Guinea with Indonesia, and Indonesia’s only link to the mainland is through Borneo, where it borders Malaysia. The shortest route between the two ends goes:
- Lesotho → South Africa
- South Africa → Botswana
- Botswana → Zambia
- Zambia → DR Congo
- DR Congo → Central African Republic
- Central African Republic → Sudan
- Sudan → Egypt
- Egypt → Israel
- Israel → Jordan
- Jordan → Iraq
- Iraq → Iran
- Iran → Afghanistan
- Afghanistan → China
- China → Laos
- Laos → Thailand
- Thailand → Malaysia
- Malaysia → Indonesia
- Indonesia → Papua New Guinea
The other 18-border pair is Lesotho and Timor-Leste. It follows the same route as far as Indonesia, then crosses the border on the island of Timor instead of New Guinea.
A note on islands. Several steps on this route cross the sea in real life. Peninsular Malaysia is separated from Malaysian Borneo by the South China Sea, and Indonesia is spread across thousands of islands. The route still counts, because it follows land borders between countries, and a country counts as one place however many islands it has. That is also how Overland works.
The bottlenecks
Almost every long route in this ranking passes through the same few countries, because Africa joins Asia at one narrow point. Egypt is the only African country with a land border into Asia, across the Sinai into Israel and the Gaza Strip. Every overland route from Africa to anywhere in Asia or Europe has to pass through Egypt.
The second bottleneck is the crossing from the Middle East into East Asia. The shortest routes go through Iran and Afghanistan, because Afghanistan borders China through the narrow Wakhan Corridor in the far northeast. The third is Southeast Asia. The only land border between mainland Asia and the islands of Malaysia and Indonesia is the one between Thailand and Peninsular Malaysia.
Other very long routes
Seventeen borders is the next step down, and it covers most of the pairs with one end in southern Africa and the other in maritime Southeast Asia:
- Lesotho to Indonesia, or to Brunei: through Africa, the Middle East, China, Laos, Thailand and Malaysia.
- Papua New Guinea to South Africa: the same route in reverse, ending one border sooner.
- Eswatini to Papua New Guinea, or to Timor-Leste: the African half of the route runs through Mozambique and Tanzania instead of Botswana and Zambia.
Leave out maritime Southeast Asia and the longest routes are 15 borders, from Lesotho to Cambodia or to Thailand. In total, 63 pairs of recognisable countries are at least 15 borders apart.
What cannot be reached at all
Most of the world’s countries are part of one connected network. Of the 238 countries and territories on our map, 134 can all be reached from each other by land, across Africa, Europe, Asia and the Indonesian archipelago. The Americas form a second network of 22 countries, from Canada to Argentina, joined through Panama. Everywhere else is cut off. The United Kingdom and Ireland form a pair of their own, as do Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and 76 countries and territories have no land border at all, from Iceland and Japan to Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands.
Why it is a good puzzle
Routes like these are what Overland is built around. You get a start and a destination and name the countries in between. Most players’ first instinct is to draw a straight line, which fails as soon as it crosses the sea. The trick is to find the bottleneck first, such as Egypt and Israel for Africa to Asia, or Thailand and Malaysia into Southeast Asia, and then build the route out from both ends. Daily puzzles keep the shortest route between two and six countries long, so you will never be asked for all eighteen, but the same thinking applies.
Sources and method
Land borders are from Natural Earth’s public-domain Admin 0 country boundaries, the same data behind Overland and Patchwork. Only land borders count. Overseas territories such as French Guiana are not counted as part of their parent country, but exclaves such as Kaliningrad are. Hong Kong is mapped as its own entity.
The route length is the smallest number of land borders crossed, found with a breadth-first search of the border network. When several routes are equally short, the one shown is one of them, not necessarily the only one. Malaysia’s border with Thailand and Indonesia’s with Papua New Guinea were missing from our map data until 2 November 2026, when we fixed them. This article uses the corrected data.