--- In BoundaryPoint@y..., "granthutchison" <granthutchison@b...>
wrote:
> > > May be slightly offshoot. I am intrigued by countries
> > > like Azerbaijan which consists of two parts which are
> > > not connected by land and neither of which are
> > > islands. One another that I recall is Kaliningrad of
> > > Russia. How many other instances are there of a
> > > country having two or more of such separate parts?
> >
> > If you count only countries with outliers that are not
> > enclaves/exclaves you would have:
> >
> > Angola (Cabinda)
> > Azerbaijan (Naxcivan)
> > Brunei (Two Sections seperated by Malaysia)
> > East Timor (Oecussi-Ambeno)
> > Oman (Musandam)
> > Russia (Kalingrad)
> > Spain (Ceuta and Melilla)
> > UK (Cypriot SBA)
> > US (Alaska)
>
> Several comments:
> 1) While researching enclaves, I phoned one of the civil servants
> who administer the SBAs to ask their exact status. He described
> them as "the last UK dependent territory" with less autonomy than
> the overseas territories or Crown dependencies, but nevertheless
> not administered as part of the UK.
In a previous message I indicated that as they are not a Territory of
the UK or Crown, I concluded they were part of the UK. I guess this
is wrong. I would like a better way to list them in my mind.
> 2) To Ceuta and Melilla you should add the prison rock of Peñón de
> Vélez de la Gomera, which is connected to the mainland by a
> sandspit that Michael and I are going to dig up some moonless night.
You are correct, I was working off the top of head when I wrote the
list.
> 3) If you want to ignoring linking territorial seas, as you have
> done in the case of Brunei (and that's a valid enough choice, I
> think), then you should also count the European part of Turkey, and
> the eastern part of Dubrovačko-Neretvanska in Croatia
>(separated from = the rest of the country by Bosnia-Herzegovina's
> short coastline).
As with #2 I missed these. (It is even worse when I consider that I
crossed over the bridge from the two sides of Turkey only two years
ago.)
This does bring up another oddball sistuation that has not been
discussed before I think. Malaysia has a section of sea coast but
access to the open sea unless it goes through Brunei waters. Obiously
this area is quite small and Malaysia has pleanty of sea access
elsewhere but it is an oddball.
> 4) What about fragments that are *on* islands, but have land
> borders? The distinction between fragment-on-an-island and fragment-
> on-a-continental-land-mass is a little artificial. So how about
> Northern Ireland and Sabah/Sarawak, as examples off the top of my
> head?
I skipped over Malaysia and NI as they are on an island which did not
match the orginal poster request but which are valid in my opinion.
I think that the request probably should have been worded to exclude
close offshore islands (like Sicily), small islands or group of
islands like the Azores (In comparison to the country they are part
of), and large islands like Borneo. This is due to the fact that a
large portion of Malaysia is on Borneo.
-Andrew