Where in the Arab World Could You Disappear? 🤯

Where in the Arab world could you disappear? The three most remote spots, counted down on a 2015 map of travel time to the nearest city.

#3 Egypt, near the Gilf Kebir: ≈4.2 days to the nearest city (100.6 h on the map); the nearest mapped track today is 53 km away.
#2 Sudan's far north-west: ≈4.9 days (117.2 h); about 40 km from any mapped track.
#1 El Djouf, Mauritania: ≈6.4 days (153.5 h); about 80 km from any mapped track.

How it was ranked: travel time means the estimated time to the nearest city of 50,000+ people, on foot where there is no road. Ranked among spots at least 25 km inside their own country with no mapped road or track within 40 km today (OpenStreetMap, 24 Sep 2026). Travel times are estimates from a 2015 global map (Weiss et al. 2018, Nature). #3 is a near-tie: Libya's and Algeria's best such spots are also about four days out.
The day figures use the map's 2015 road data; the nearest tracks to all three spots were mapped after that, so today's times may be shorter. The red zones and glow are drawn from the same map.

Sources:
Travel time: D. J. Weiss et al. (2018), "A global map of travel time to cities to assess inequalities in accessibility in 2015", Nature - doi.org/10.1038/nature25181 (data: Malaria Atlas Project, CC BY 4.0 - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ; recoloured, cropped and thresholded)
Roads and tracks: © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL - https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright (nearest mapped road or track, queried 24 Sep 2026; the tracks drawn in the video)
Arab League members: League of Arab States × Museum With No Frontiers - https://www.museumwnf.org/league-of-arab-states/?page=LAS-member-states.php
Dashed line on 27°40' N: US Office of the Geographer, International Boundary Study No. 9 (1961)

Satellite map: Sentinel-2 cloudless 2025 - https://s2maps.eu by EOX IT Services GmbH (Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2025)
Sea: Blue Marble imagery, NASA Earth Observatory, via NASA GIBS (ESDIS)
Maps: Natural Earth (public domain)
Flags: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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