Everyone has someplace they go to get away from it all. But what if you really wanted to get away from it all, and by “away” you meant “more than 1,600 miles away” and by “it all” you meant “all dry land whatsoever on all sides”? In that case, boy, do I have the destination for you: Point Nemo in the South Pacific.

View Point Nemo in a larger map

For man’s first millennium of exploring the seven seas, no one had any idea where to find the literal “middle” of the ocean, the point on the surface of the waves farther from dry land than any other. But the math is only a matter of triangles: The remotest point will be equidistant from three different points somewhere along the world’s coastlines. But which three points?

The invention of modern computers in the 20th century made it possible, for the first time, to solve this very hard geometry problem. In 1992, a Croatian-Canadian survey engineer named Hrvoje Lukatela used a geospatial program of his own design, called Hipparchus, to compute the location of the least accessible point on Earth. He called it Point Nemo, in honor of the enigmatic submarine captain from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

So where is Point Nemo? As you’d expect—and just like Captain Nemo’s “mysterious island” base—it lies smack-dab in the middle of the South Pacific, 1,670 miles from the three nearest dots of land. Way off to the north is Ducie Island, an uninhabited atoll in the Pitcairn Islands, where the Bounty mutineers settled. To the northeast is Motu Nui, a tiny islet off Easter Island which is the westernmost point of Chile. And to the south is snowy Maher Island, off the Antarctic coast. “Point Nemo” is the center of an empty circle of ocean about the size of North America.

Jules Verne took the name “Nemo” from the Latin for “nobody,” and that’s appropriate in this case. Located, as it is, a few weeks’ sail from anywhere, in the middle of 12,000 feet of water, it’s quite possible that Point Nemo has never had a single visitor. Time to start making those vacation plans for next year—and if you'd rather be in the middle of nowhere on dry land, read my column on the world's poles of inaccessibility

Explore the world's oddities every week on CondeNastTraveler.com with Ken Jennings. Check out his latest book, Maphead__.