Fancy a trip? Thanks to a new railway link between China and Laos, it’s now possible to travel all the way from Portugal to Singapore by train (well, sort of).
Believed by Reddit users to be the longest geodesic (that is, from point to point on the globe, taking curvature into account) train trip in the world, the route runs from Lagos – or Cascais or Sintra, if you prefer – in Portugal to Singapore, with connections along the way in cities such as Paris, Moscow, and Bangkok. Measured geodesically, the distance between the two endpoints is roughly 12,000km.
The final missing link in the chain, a high-speed rail line (pictured above at Vang Vieng station in Laos) between the Laotian capital of Vientiane and the Chinese border, opened up just this month.
Some caveats before you book your tickets, as blogger Jon Worth points out: not all connecting trains depart from the same stations, so in places you’ll have to go by tram, metro, or Shanks’ pony (it’s up to you whether you count trams and metro lines as “trains”); the only leg of the journey currently open into Russia is restricted to Russian and Finnish citizens; and several other border crossings are also closed due to COVID-19.
Still, once everything opens up – and if you don’t mind a couple of gruelling cross-town treks – you might just consider taking several weeks off for the train trip of a lifetime.
Just mind the gaps when boarding or alighting from the approximately 30 trains you’ll need to catch.
