In the early days of convict settlement in Oz (late 1700s-early 1800s) some convicts managed to escape from the township and head off into the bush......by their reckoning, if they walked long enough they would end up in China. Or perhaps back in England, from whence they came. The notion of just how far away that was hadn't come into their equation at all, because they just didn't know.

It's like digging a hole in the ground and expecting the other end of the hole to be in China, which is not very possible unless one started digging in China in the first place.