Then there is The Reversing Falls, at Saint John, New Brunswick in Canada. A river that not only reverses it’s flow but actually has a waterfall that falls one way at low tide and the other way at high tide.
As a child I sat and watched this thing for several hours and it is truely amazing. Of course the entire Bay of Fundy is an experience you should witness sometime in your life. Talk about non-intuative that thing is mind blowing.
The really confusing thing about Egypt is not that the Nile flows north, but that the country is identified relative to the flow of the Nile. That is, the southern part of the country is called Upper Egypt because it’s upstream, and the northern part is called Lower Egypt. Understandable because of the historical importance of the Nile to the Egyptian culture.
Oh hell. Make that “The mouth of the river is further from the center of the earth than is the source because the of the equatorial bulge of the earth”
Previewing can also screw you up if you don’t preview the complete post.
Well, aside from the aforementioned overwhelming logical disconnect we all have from centuries of looking at maps with North at the top, and hence “up”, and South being “down”, and us expecting water to flow “down” …
… all other things are not equal, of course. There is more land in the northern part of the world and more ocean in the southern part, so one might expect that, for all of that rainwater to make its way to the oceanwater in the south, there might, in truth, be more rivers with their mouths further south than their sources than vice-versa.
I don’t have any data to back this up. Anyone know how many rivers are north-south and how many south-north?
The link that lel gave has details. You’re right that there are relatively few big rivers that flow north.
Of the 10 longest rivers, generally speaking:
So, out of the world’s 10 longest rivers, four flow north and another two flow north for a significant part of their course.
I think part of the reason for this common misconception may be that the huge rivers in Siberia, which flow north to the Arctic Ocean, are relatively unknown.
(My mind is still boggling over the fact that people, subconsciously or not, associate “up on the map” with being “up on the ground”. Surely it’s not just me that has never thought that?)
Sorry, ignore that line - I think I’ve disproved it underneath! 
In the U.S., that notion has been enshrined in the language. I live in Virginia. Anyone heading for Boston says, “I’m going up to Boston tomorrow.” If they’re going to Miami, it becomes, “I’m flying down to Miami.”
Don’t people who live in, say, Birmingham go “down to London” or “up to Scotland?”
Yes, we say the same thing. But I thought (and it looks like I could be wrong here) that most people knew that that was only a figure of speech… I mean, my girlfriend lives in Birmingham, I live in London (yep, really convenient :rolleyes: ) and sure I talk about “going up” to see her [TMI](or “going down” in her case, of course 
)[/TMI]. But I don’t think we mean it in the uphill/downhill sense.
Heh. That reminds me of an FoF story told to me about an imperious Gamecock (South Carolina) Civil War professor.
“A-why,” he asked, “did the Nawth win the Civil Wahr?”
My friend’s friend supposedly raised his hand and said, “because they were fighting downhill.”
He was kicked out of the class.
Of course, people in Maine refer to their habitat directionally as “down Maine”.
That’s “down east”, I think–
Railway terminology here in the UK uses “up” and “down”. In general on a multitrack route you get the down line which goes towards London and the up line going away from London. I do not know what they call lines which go nowhere near the capital. Pehaps this is the origin of the phrase " going down to London"