Shortest tours of Eurasia and Oceania

Posted on by John

This is the final post in a series of three posts about shortest tours, solutions to the so-called traveling salesmen problem.

The first was a tour of Africa. Actually two tours, one for the continent and one for islands. See this post for the Mathematica code used to create the tours.

The second was about the Americas: one tour for the North American continent, one for islands, and one for South America.

This post will look at Eurasia and Oceania. As before, I limit the tours to sovereign states, though there are disputes over which regions are independent nations. I first tried to do separate tours of Europe and Asia, but this would require arbitrarily categorizing some countries as European or Asian. The distinction between Asia and Oceania is a little fuzzy too, but not as complicated.

Oceania

Here’s a map of the tour of Oceania.

Here’s the order of the tour:

  1. Australia
  2. East Timor
  3. Indonesia
  4. Palau
  5. Papua New Guinea
  6. Micronesia
  7. Marshall Islands
  8. Nauru
  9. Solomon Islands
  10. Vanuatu
  11. Fiji
  12. Tuvalu
  13. Kiribati
  14. Samoa
  15. Tonga
  16. New Zealand

The total length of the tour is 28,528 kilometers or 17,727 miles.

Eurasia

Here’s a map of the the Eurasian tour.

Here’s the order of the tour:

  1. Iceland
  2. Norway
  3. Sweden
  4. Finland
  5. Estonia
  6. Latvia
  7. Lithuania
  8. Belarus
  9. Poland
  10. Czech Republic
  11. Slovakia
  12. Hungary
  13. Romania
  14. Moldova
  15. Ukraine
  16. Georgia
  17. Armenia
  18. Azerbaijan
  19. Turkmenistan
  20. Uzbekistan
  21. Afghanistan
  22. Pakistan
  23. Tajikistan
  24. Kyrgyzstan
  25. Kazakhstan
  26. Russia
  27. Mongolia
  28. China
  29. North Korea
  30. South Korea
  31. Japan
  32. Taiwan
  33. Philippines
  34. East Timor
  35. Indonesia
  36. Brunei
  37. Malaysia
  38. Singapore
  39. Cambodia
  40. Vietnam
  41. Laos
  42. Thailand
  43. Myanmar
  44. Bangladesh
  45. Bhutan
  46. Nepal
  47. India
  48. Sri Lanka
  49. Maldives
  50. Yemen
  51. Oman
  52. United Arab Emirates
  53. Qatar
  54. Bahrain
  55. Saudi Arabia
  56. Kuwait
  57. Iran
  58. Iraq
  59. Syria
  60. Lebanon
  61. Jordan
  62. Israel
  63. Cyprus
  64. Turkey
  65. Bulgaria
  66. North Macedonia
  67. Serbia
  68. Bosnia and Herzegovina
  69. Montenegro
  70. Albania
  71. Greece
  72. Malta
  73. Italy
  74. San Marino
  75. Croatia
  76. Slovenia
  77. Austria
  78. Liechtenstein
  79. Switzerland
  80. Monaco
  81. Andorra
  82. Spain
  83. Portugal
  84. France
  85. Belgium
  86. Luxembourg
  87. Germany
  88. Netherlands
  89. Denmark
  90. United Kingdom
  91. Algeria

The total length of the tour is 61,783 kilometers or 38,390 miles.

3 thoughts on “Shortest tours of Eurasia and Oceania”

  1. Ben Holzman

    These appear to use the geographic center of each country — it would be more interesting (albeit much more difficult) to determine the shortest tour which only needs to touch somewhere inside each country.

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