To clarify: Bhutan and Burma barely come within 200 miles of each other.
Re: boundaries being visible from space, the border between Lesotho and South Africa stands out pretty clearly, too.
Good lord, people, you do all realize that equating Mexico with Tijuana and Juarez is like equating the USA with Cabrini Green?
That does raise a related question, though I’m not sure how you could qualify it properly. The habitations in Libya and Niger closest to each other probably are less dissimilar than the average values used. And there certainly do exist places — like Juarez — where the difference of merely crossing the border brings a stark contrast in living conditions. Although such disparity exists even within cities, sometimes with even just a single road separating them.
The point about Libya is a good one, and it applies to a lot of the country pairings considered: countries like Libya, Equatorial Guinea, Qatar, Angola and arguably even South Africa technically may have high GDPs-per-capita but it’s concentrated in the hands of very few, often because of oil wealth, so the average settlement won’t be all that different from those in the poor countries they’re being compared to. That’s why I think the best answers are South Korea/North Korea and Israel/Palestine, where living standards are fairly evenly spread across the two sets of populations. There are suburbs of Seoul in South Korea which would be a short drive from towns in North Korea, yet I imagine the difference between them is stunning.
Detroit <-> Grosse Pointe Park.
Detroit per capita income in 2000: $14,717
Grosse Pointe Park per capita income in 2000: $42,051
Thailand/Cambodia was my first thought. I’ve crossed into Cambodia from Thailand. The Cambodian border town of Poipet is very much in the running for the title of Armpit of the Universe.
I actually made the same crossing last year. While Poipet is definitely a shithole, I didn’t think Aranyaprathet on the other side of the border was that much better.
Although quite a few places in Cambodia are very nice, Thailand gets much more better from Aranyaprathet than Cambodia does from Poipet.
I’d say it’s most likely the border between Scotland and England. Driving north, everything seems normal, then you stop at a town past the border and go into a chippy and then… the horror. The horror.
Zimbabwe and Botswana:
I thought this was dramatic.
Driving between Grosse Pointe and Detroit, take a look how quickly it transforms after the 1:00 mark.
Oi! What’s wrong with a deep-fried macaroni pie? 