not technically correct. You could hit australia in half a dozen hops and manchester in 20. It all depends on the network and how the routers and switches are loaded etc.
Plus a request is not sent as a single request so some packets may have a few hops whilst others have loads.
I posted a link once to "Warriers of the Net", its quite a good watch for anyone with a slight technical interest( and even those that don't have its still worth watching as it explains in dead simple langauge how teh 'internet' works)
Warriors of the Net clips