I want to describe a situation when to get a south bound route you need to drive north. I'm looking for a noun. A couple possible suggestions I've seen:
"It is quite a bit of a diversion"
and
"It is quite a bit of a detour"
One could call it an "indirect route", but I'm looking for a noun, not an adjective.
Sometimes you've got to go "the long way round". I've used that before, but never thought about it before.
Meander is a noun that refers to a bend in a sinuous or winding river. Wikipedia notes,
...in Classical Greece the name of the river had become a common noun meaning anything convoluted and winding, such as decorative patterns or speech and ideas [...] Strabo said: "... its course is so exceedingly winding that everything winding is called meandering."
Thus, one might refer to a route as a meander, although the adjectival form meandering is more frequently heard. Some related adjectives include circuitous, roundabout, tortuous, winding, serpentine, crooked, sinuous, snaky. Some of these are also used as nouns; for example, serpentine meanings include "coiled distillation tube". One might plausibly call a winding route a serpent.
One could also say, "It's rather an excursion" to indicate that a route is unnecessarily roundabout.
A common turn of phrase is:
meaning a difficult method to get to something that should have been straightforward.
Circumnavigation is a noun for, literally, heading south to go north (or vice-versa, as your first sentence contradicts your headline; or perhaps your question is going south to get north?).
A route that doubles back on itself can be called a dogleg. E.g. if I want to travel by train from A to B, sometimes the fastest route is take a non-stop service that goes past B and stops at C, and then take a slow train from B to C. This is called a dogleg route.
A -------------------------> C
B <---
The term I would use is reverse psychology. As in "don't throw me into the briar patch."
