Interesting borders


 * See border crossing for practical concerns.

Borders between countries, states, territories and other geographic entities can at times be attractions in their own right.

Understand
"The Gatekeepers of Baal, they dare not sit or lean, but fume and fret and posture, and foam and curse between."

- Rudyard Kipling

An enclave is a country or territory entirely surrounded by another. Examples of enclave countries are San Marino (surrounded by Italy) and Lesotho (surrounded by South Africa).

An exclave is a part of a country or territory which is not contiguous with the rest of its land area, but on the same land mass. Some examples are Alaska of the United States, and Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia.

A tripoint is the conjunction of three countries or territories. These are fairly common; quadripoints (conjunctions of four countries or territories) or higher-level conjunctions are rather unusual, and mostly appear in a colonial context, in which borders have been defined by straight lines between coordinates, rather than natural features. There are a couple of near-quadripoints, at which four countries or territories are within a short distance.

Up a lazy river: there's just something about river border posts. A good example is the Mekong river ferry between Vietnam and Phnom Penh in Cambodia, where the boat draws in to the mudbanks and you skitter on planks up to the border station. Picture palm trees, louche officialdom, and a ceiling fan turning lazily.

Traffic switch, when a drive-on-the-right country meets a drive-on-the left – somewhere between them is a mixture of dodgems and wacky races. Examples are Thailand with Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar, Pakistan with China, Iran and Afghanistan, and mainland China with Hong Kong and Macau. Regimental histories gloss over this point, but one of the dangers of the Khyber Pass was the Torkham traffic switch on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Except enclaves and exclaves there are many border anomalies to be found. Also, structures build at or by the border may have their oddities. Sometimes these are the results of border having changed.

Rail lines and roads that serve one country may pass through a neighbour. Examples include Berlin's U-Bahn during the Cold War (when the city was split by the Iron Curtain), the Trans-Siberian Railway passing through Kazakhstan (which was part of the empire when the railway was built) and the Saatse Boot, an Estonian road also partly getting on the wrong side of a new border.

In some cases, the only practical route into a settlement may pass through another country. This is often caused by a border river changing its course, leaving some territory on the wrong side of it. Sometimes, building a road to a remote settlement may not be feasible. A border "conveniently" placed along a river or a certain latitude may totally ignore local specifics, such as cutting off a peninsula, or cutting through the land of local communities. On the Finnish-Swedish border in the Torne Valley, most every village has one part on each side of the border river.

Sometimes, infrastructure is deliberately build at the border, to serve both sides. This is the case for some airstrips, which use border crossing facilities on a nearby road, novelty golf courses – which may straddle time zones too, and use differences in booze policy to their advantage – and some "friendship" constructs, such as the Québec-Vermont library or, less friendly, the Joint Security Area of the Koreas.

Infrastructure may also have been built on the wrong side of a border, perhaps before the border was surveyed. The Russian Empire probably didn't much care about the border through the Märket islet when they built a lighthouse there, causing quite some headache for a 1980s border survey.

Destinations
Here are some borders that have been especially agreeable to cross in the early 21st century:
 * [[Image:Pervouralsk Border Europe Asia.jpg|thumb|right|Monument "Europe-Asia"]]
 * [[Image:Pervouralsk Border Europe Asia.jpg|thumb|right|Monument "Europe-Asia"]]
 * [[Image:Pervouralsk Border Europe Asia.jpg|thumb|right|Monument "Europe-Asia"]]
 * [[Image:Pervouralsk Border Europe Asia.jpg|thumb|right|Monument "Europe-Asia"]]
 * [[Image:Pervouralsk Border Europe Asia.jpg|thumb|right|Monument "Europe-Asia"]]
 * [[Image:Pervouralsk Border Europe Asia.jpg|thumb|right|Monument "Europe-Asia"]]
 * [[Image:Pervouralsk Border Europe Asia.jpg|thumb|right|Monument "Europe-Asia"]]
 * [[Image:Pervouralsk Border Europe Asia.jpg|thumb|right|Monument "Europe-Asia"]]
 * [[Image:Pervouralsk Border Europe Asia.jpg|thumb|right|Monument "Europe-Asia"]]
 * [[Image:Pervouralsk Border Europe Asia.jpg|thumb|right|Monument "Europe-Asia"]]
 * [[Image:Pervouralsk Border Europe Asia.jpg|thumb|right|Monument "Europe-Asia"]]
 * [[Image:Pervouralsk Border Europe Asia.jpg|thumb|right|Monument "Europe-Asia"]]
 * [[Image:Pervouralsk Border Europe Asia.jpg|thumb|right|Monument "Europe-Asia"]]
 * [[Image:Pervouralsk Border Europe Asia.jpg|thumb|right|Monument "Europe-Asia"]]
 * [[Image:Pervouralsk Border Europe Asia.jpg|thumb|right|Monument "Europe-Asia"]]
 * [[Image:Pervouralsk Border Europe Asia.jpg|thumb|right|Monument "Europe-Asia"]]
 * [[Image:Pervouralsk Border Europe Asia.jpg|thumb|right|Monument "Europe-Asia"]]
 * [[Image:Pervouralsk Border Europe Asia.jpg|thumb|right|Monument "Europe-Asia"]]

These we have lost: the DDR – West Berlin border so long as you had a western passport and money in your pocket. Checkpoint Charlie is the best known but even more curious was Checkpoint Friedrichstrasse, with metro platforms and trains for both east and west city networks separated by five lethal metres of track.