Imagine if an American said he was going across the "world" from New York to California.
It makes for a much better headline than "Man attempts to walk across the largest section of the earth that you can."
And also, to "walk across" sort of implies you only need to do half of it.
I'm too tired to check, but Internet, is there any continuos stretch of land that connects one point on earth to it's polar opposite on the sphere?
(too "tired to check" should also imply "too tired to post comment", but oh well. it already is resulting in "too tired to properly edit")
I know this sounds ridiculous, but I've sometimes fantasized about walking around the world and the best you could do in theory is about 10x the distance from New York to California: South America to West Africa (assuming you can cross a frozen Bering Strait). That's 20,000 miles. In reality, you'd probably face insurmountable political and legal difficulties with crossing borders.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumnavigation#Human-powered
The 9,000 miles Michael Lee Johnson is attempting is pretty impressive. I've got a lot of respect for this guy for trying.
>I'm too tired to check, but Internet, is there any continuos stretch of land that connects one point on earth to it's polar opposite on the sphere?
Yes! I believe so, based on what I said previously. Here are some tools to get you started:
http://www.findlatitudeandlongitude.com/antipode-map/
http://www.daftlogic.com/projects-google-maps-distance-calcu...
It definitely isn't an insurmountable challenge.
Edit: D'oh, you could probably do much better by ending at South Africa.