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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

I think that's mainly just a odd thing about the US and Canada - other, sometimes larger, countries have many places where you could easily access multiple other countries.

China (larger than the US but smaller than Canada) has 16 tripoints and Russia (larger than the US and Canada) has at least 11 tripoints:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripoint

edit: I misread the list of countries by area on Wikipedia - US is slightly larger than China....

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On the other hand, the USA has a semi-enclave, which is rather unusual; you have to cross Canada if you want to get from Washington to Alaska by land. Russia has Kaliningrad but that's not quite on the same scale. From a British perspective, though, these distinctions are rather hard to make - Britain has between the largest number of semi-enclaves in the world and none, depending on how you count the many former imperial territories.

Nitpick, I think you mean exclave

FWIW those tripoints in China are mostly very far away from population centers. If Mexico was 10 countries it would still take GP 3 hours to drive to family and not leave the state.

I assume you're referring to the contiguous 48 states, because the total land mass of the USA is 2% larger than China, not smaller.

Thanks for the correction - I wasn't particularly careful looking at the list on Wikpedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

You were actually correct. See note [e] in that table.

This is incorrect. China's landmass is larger than the US (including Alaska). The US is only larger if you include coastal and territorial waters, clearly not landmass area.

Or any island country, which is most countries in South-East Asia and Oceania.

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