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.
