It turns out that Tibet is the most inaccessible place in the world and specifically the point on coordinates 34.7°N, 85.7°E. It takes a three-week trip to the cities of Lhasa or Korla - one day by car and the remaining 20 on foot. So if you are looking for a really peaceful place to restore your mind and take a break from civilization well, here you have it.

There are also a number of other related and fascinating maps out of this study. Here is how the world is covered by:

Roads

Railways

The model takes into account all these elements to estimate the distance to the nearest center. More specifically this is how the researchers estimated the distance according to the kind of surface.


The map is simple but well designed. If you give a look to the bigger version you'll notice how color is mapped on a nonlinear scale. Brighter colors represent hour intervals whereas darker ones represent day intervals. The darkest points represent 5 days.

Europe and Japan somewhat scare me in terms of how easy is to go from one point to another. United States, regardless their development, contain a relatively dense number of quite places. Tibet and Greenland looks like the best places if you want to stay remote.

As Alan Belward, who leads the project, says: the interesting part of the project will be in comparing this same map with another one computed in the future. What scares me is the perspective of having no more remote places in the world. Is this far to come?