Antipodal Nodes

I’ve been reading Seth Stevenson’s book on overland circumnavigation of the globe, “Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World”, and he brings up an interesting point: To truly circumnavigate the globe, one must start and end in the same place, cross every line of longitude going in the same direction (in my case, west to east) and touch two antipodal points.

The latter is an interesting challenge, as there isn’t much land in the southern hemisphere to make that diametrical connection. Thankfully, I found a handy antipodal point calculator and can set my two points. The first one, Singapore, is easy. And lo, its antipodal point is in Yasuni National Park in Ecuador.

That seems the most logical set of points to use and it gives me a structure to the trip. If I can find the paths to these two points, starting and ending in New Delhi, I’ll have circumnavigated the globe. Along the way, I’ll have covered way more than 25,000 miles, which is the equatorial circumference of the earth.