The Pan-American Highway: The longest walk in the world

If you love a good long walk, New Zealand isn’t a bad spot to live or travel. Our 10 Great Walks attract roamers and ramblers from around the world.

At 82km, the Heaphy Track is the longest of the bunch but if you’re in the mood for something longer, it may be worth putting the Pan-American Highway on your hitlist.

The route, which stretches 30,500km between Ushuaia, Argentina, to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, can also be described as one of the longest in the world without needing to cross a body of water.

Like most walks of this magnitude, there are several start and endpoints, as well as routes in between, you can choose.

Despite being the world’s longest “motorable road” according to Guinness World Records, you cannot traverse the entire route by car, due to a 106km stretch of unruly forest called Darién Gap.

Most walkers circumvent the Gap by boarding a ferry from Panama to Colombia or Ecuador. However, two people have been recorded as completing the entire walk, including the Darién Gap, on foot.

The first adventurer to complete the Argentina-Alaska trek was British former sailor George Meegan. Beginning in 1977, it took Meegan 2,425 days to complete the 30,608km multipart journey.

Around 35 years later, former US Army Ranger Holly Harrison tackled the same voyage, completing a slightly more direct route of 23,305 km in 530 days.

However, not everyone considers the Darién Gap traversable, prompting one Reddit user to mark out an alternative ‘longest journey by foot’ between Cape Town, South Africa, and Magadan, Russia. The trail would be approximately 22,104 km.

If you wanted to walk in a dead straight line, wearing boots that could cross any terrain (think the mountains of Central Asia), two intrepid engineers discovered a trip that would start in China and finish in Portugal.

Calculated by Rohan Chabukswar and Kushal Mukherjee in 2018, the path would run for 11,240 km without crossing any bodies of water.

Instead, it would travel through China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, France and Spain before concluding in Sagres, Portugal.

Without said magical hiking boots, most of us will have to stick to better-known routes that are famous around the world. Or, some equally world-class tracks right in our backyard.

Just make sure you brush up on our hiking advice for tacking a New Zealand Great Walk before setting out.