I always thought it shared borders with Malaysia, since we crossed the borders there between Malaysia and Singapore. Guess I didn't look out the window well enough to see it was all islands.
The Panama canal has bridges and also is in the middle of the country. You can't cross from Panama to Colombia because there is a dense jungle in the border called the Darién Gap
You know it's some crazy, crazy jungle when they choose not to build a road through it, and yet - just north of there - they dug an enormous system of trenches literally across the entire country so ships could move across land. One of the world's most audacious engineering projects in human history was more a palatable and ultimately doable idea than 60+ miles of tarmac.
It is a crazy dangerous jungle. But there are some important historical reasons for which the road was never built. Panama was a part of Colombia, and after gaining independence wasn't too interested in building a road that would allow a Colombian army to march right into the country. Later, the dense rain forest of the Darien gap partially protected Panama by containing some Colombia's problems, including the civil war, drug smuggling and outbreaks of hoof and mouth disease. Although policy makers are less concerned about the environment, ecologically speaking, the construction of a highway would be a total disaster, bisecting one of the most diverse ecological hot spots in the world and giving loggers access to the largest continuous rain forest in Central America and the biggest in South America after the Amazon.
It's not the canal. There are two major highways that go over the canal. It's jungle, mountains, national parks and politics. And on both sides of the border there just isn't much that is developed in that area. It would be extraordinarily expensive to try and finish a decent road connecting the major metropolitan areas of both countries and bridge the Darien Gap, and not economically viable since there are already many cheap and efficient water and air routes that serve the same function.
As another poster pointed out, Panama gained its independence from Colombia. Why make it easy for them to try and reclaim Panama? A physical barrier is one of the best protections.
The "protection" that they are talking about is from an invading force of another country. I assume that you're talking about the border wall between Mexico and the US which is a social issue due to migrants from all over central america and not because mexico are suddenly going to march their army into the US.
In the heatwave last year, I heard a lot online about how far north northern Europe is compared with the USA and Canada. Even living in the UK I'd never really appreciated it before.
The time zone one made me pause for a long time. Xinjiang has, sort of, its own time zone. You have to learn which things operate on Xinjiang time (almost everything) and which things on national time.
I have only ever seen Singapore on a world map, so I always thought it was sitting on the peninsula with Malaysia. Had to google it to believe it, lol. Guess I learn something new every day. :)
If you want to get technical, then yes, it is a country. However, it does not have an independent system of governance/political system from the U.K., so it is in effect a territory.
If you want to claim that part of the Arctic Ocean is always frozen, then you should give a time frame. There have been, through history, and will be, in the future, periods where the whole thing has been unfrozen.
Can you change the Minnesota question so that it does not read like Minnesota borders all of the Great Lakes? Something like "Minnesota borders a Great Lake" or "Minnesota borders at least one Great Lake."
Yep, l got the proverbial two disappointments. This time two in a row: Panama blocked my joyous route to Buenos Aires, and it's weird for a country the size of China to have a single time zone (even tiny Portugal has two, owing to its insular possessions in the Atlantic).
there isn't enough reason for them to build a highly expensive and dangerous road.