{"id":2454,"date":"2026-10-31T13:02:53","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T12:02:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.geonatives.org\/?p=2454"},"modified":"2026-10-31T13:02:53","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T12:02:53","slug":"halloween-special-enclaves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.geonatives.org\/?p=2454","title":{"rendered":"Halloween Special: Enclaves"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

(4 min read)<\/sub><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once we were already scared by gaps between countries<\/a> where you don\u2019t know which traffic rules to apply. The gaps can be even larger than this if countries don\u2019t care about land such as Egypt and Sudan are doing in the Halaib Triangle issue: The region called Bir Tawil<\/a>\u00a0is neither claimed by Egypt nor by Sudan. There were several attempts<\/a> to claim the land to declare a new country but none of these attempts got accepted (or even recognized) by the United Nations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next level of having fun with borders are enclaves: They are\u00a0territory\u00a0that are entirely surrounded by the territory of only one other\u00a0state\u00a0or\u00a0entity. The most famous ones are Vatican City encircled by Italy or Lesotho enclaved by South Africa. But there can be also semi-enclaves such as Kaliningrad or Monaco.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tajikistan (Vorukh) and Usbekistan (So\u2019x and Shohimardon) have some larger enclaves in Kyrgystan, but India and Bangladesh<\/a> seem to love this construct: Bangladesh contained 102 Indian enclaves, which in turn contained 21 Bangladeshi counter-enclaves. To make it even more interesting one of it contained an Indian enclave, which made it the only third-order enclave<\/a> in the world! In contrast, India contained 71 Bangladeshi enclaves, which in turn contained 3 Indian counter-enclaves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The diagramatic sketch of Cooch Behar district of West Bengal marking enclaves. (Wikipedia<\/a> CC BY-SA 3.0<\/a>) <\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It was long-time agreed (since the 70s) to swap these claims and Bangladesh signed but India allowed themself plenty of time (roughly 40 years) to adopt the agreement. Bangladesh received 111 and India 51 enclaves, and the residents were allowed to become citizens of the new state or moved to the previous one. Dahagram is the only remaining enclave. But the regions around Patgram and Dahagram or Sakura are still showing a very weird border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It seems that human mankind likes to fool around with borders trying to make live even more complicated (we already mentioned that nature doesn\u2019t know borders<\/a> \u2014 if we consider tree lines, shores and escarpment as not intentionally created.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But sometimes nature forces us to create borders and the time zones are a good example: Because we try to fit our modern life (meaning communication and traffic for trade) into a reliable framework we need to know which time is where. The creepiness we want to address in this Halloween Special<\/a> is not about the reasonableness of the daylight saving time<\/a> (ask the people in Arizona US, because most of Arizona applies daylight saving but the north-east of Arizona \u2014 the Navajo Nation \u2014 doesn\u2019t) but about how the time zones are shaped. If you look at the time zone map<\/a> you realize that the lines are not straight but very much scrawly and dented because, again, politics is overruling nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

China and Europe try to squeeze everything into one time zone to unify and therefore simplify whereas the United States and Russia are smart and brave enough to let time happen as it happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Chinese time unifications leads to the situation that the time switches by 3,5 hours while crossing the border from Afghanistan to China or by 2,5 from India to China or only 2 from Kyrgystan to China all at a very similar longitude. But also within Russia you can sometimes switch by two hours traveling across one time zone boarder (e.g., from Moscow Time UTC+3 to Yekaterinburg Time UTC+5 or from Krasnoyarsk Time UTC+7 to Yakutsk Time UTC+9).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A visualization of the mismatch between clock time and solar time in different locations. (Wikipedia<\/a> Public Domain<\/a>)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But there are some semi-enclaves which make reading the clock complicated. Kiribati\u2019s island Kiritimati<\/a> is located nearly on the same longitude (-157\u00b0) as Hawaii but it is in the time zone UTC+14 compared to Hawaii UTC-10! Kiribati moved themselves from one day to another to be more in sync with Australia. This is where future and past overlap!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the Diomendes islands future and past are peaceful neighbors: The western Diomendes island belongs to Russia and is located in UTC+12 and the eastern one belongs to the US and is in UTC-12. The distance between one day and the next is only 4 kilometers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But back to the “real” borders. If we consider nature as a good basis to create borders we can also be tricked as the conflict between Croatia and Serbia<\/a> shows: Whereas Serbia would like to stick the border to the lowest elevation of the river Danube, Croatia sticks to the boundaries of the cadastral municipalities along the river. These are kind of old and meanwhile the Danube changed its course quite a bit. Nature seems to be about constant change<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless, human mankind can learn from nature and created silly borders based on infrastructure (like following rivers): Germany and Belgium are sharing some interesting corridors which became necessary after the First World War when Germany had to assign land to Belgium. Belgium claimed also the Fen Railway to be able to continue to serve their important cities Malmedy and Eupen. Thus, the railway line was cutting through Germany creating five exclaves<\/a>. The railway is already history and the corridor now serves as a cycling track but is still Belgian territory. Thus, Belgian traffic rules apply (at most parts of the track but some sections are under German jurisdiction) while having Germany next to you! If there is a crash on Belgian ground, Germany is not allowed to help, and pain and suffering compensation can differ a lot! Trick or treat? Enjoy human-mankind-made madness! Happy Halloween!<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The next level of having fun with borders are enclaves but some constructs are really to become insane<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2451,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,14],"tags":[91,68,76],"class_list":["post-2454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","category-oddities","tag-border","tag-china","tag-halloween"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.geonatives.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.geonatives.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.geonatives.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.geonatives.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.geonatives.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2454"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.geonatives.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2458,"href":"https:\/\/www.geonatives.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454\/revisions\/2458"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.geonatives.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.geonatives.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.geonatives.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.geonatives.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}