Russia's best-loved bogatyr was a peasant's son who could not walk until he was 33. Then he set out for Kiev, defended a city, killed a whistling monster in the forest and became the chief hero of Prince Vladimir's court.
The route follows the epic songs known as byliny, from his village near Murom to the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, where the relics of a real monk, Ilya Pechersky, are said by some to be the hero's. Legend and history are marked apart: the pins show where tradition puts the story, not proof that it happened.
Sleeping Dogs sends an undercover cop into the Sun On Yee triad across a compact Hong Kong built from four real Island districts. The designers photographed the city for a week and then bent it to fit the story.
This route visits the four districts in turn, starting with Aberdeen, where the story opens. Pins mark whole districts, not mission sites: no source ties a specific mission to a street.
Mafia II is set in Empire Bay, a city that never existed but borrows from six real American ones. This route follows Vito's story from Sicily in 1943 to the 1951 war between mob families and the Triads.
Only Sicily and a New York City stand-in are pinned; the sources tie no mission to a real place, so the remaining story stops stay unpinned.
Port Royal and Tortuga were built on a quiet St Vincent bay, Cannibal Island is Dominican rainforest, and a private Bahamian cay sits behind a famous duel.
This route follows the shoots from St Vincent in 2002 through Dominica in 2005 to Grand Bahama, where the ships were filmed in a hurricane season. Most pins mark areas, not exact sets; the sets themselves were built and taken down.
Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, goes looking for the secret of immortality. This route follows the epic from its city to the Cedar Forest and the flood hero's home, then to the Nineveh library where the tablets were found.
The poem's places are legend and the tablets' places are archaeology; each stop says which, and which pins are only candidates. The Iraqi sites are not visitor destinations.
Harriet Tubman escaped slavery in 1849 and then went back to Maryland about 13 times, bringing out some 70 people. Her work depended on a chain of Quakers, free Black ministers and abolitionists who hid and moved people north.
The route follows that chain from the Eastern Shore through Wilmington and Philadelphia to Niagara and Salem Chapel in St. Catharines, then to her farm at Auburn. Real routes were kept secret, so most pins are approximate.
At 21, Jack London sailed north in July 1897 to join the Klondike gold rush. He came home without gold but with scurvy and the stories that made his name: The Call of the Wild, "To Build a Fire" and more.
This route follows him from the beach at Dyea over the Chilkoot Pass, down the lakes and rapids of the Yukon, through a winter at the Stewart River to Dawson City, where his cabin still stands.
Hemingway wrote his last great novella in Cuba, about a fisherman and one enormous marlin. The places around it are real: the hotel room where he first lived, the bar he loved, the house where he wrote, and the fishing village next door.
This route follows the writer's Cuba from Old Havana to the harbour of Cojímar, where the Pilar was moored. The novella itself is under copyright, so the story is kept to its outline.
Finland's national epic was gathered, not invented: a country doctor named Elias Lönnrot walked into the forests of Karelia and wrote down what the old singers recited.
The route follows his collecting trips from 1832 to 1834, from Viena Karelia to his home at Kajaani and the first draft at Kuhmo, then visits three places the runes name: the Imatra rapids, the island of Saari and the Kemi river. The poem's geography is loose, so the last two pins are marked as guesses.
A boy born in Eisleben becomes a monk, a professor and the man who defied an emperor. Along the way he vows in a thunderstorm, challenges the church over indulgences, is spirited away in disguise and ends his life where it began.
The route follows Luther through seven places in Germany: his birth house, the Erfurt monastery, the Wittenberg church doors, the Diet of Worms, the Wartburg, his Wittenberg home and the house where he died. The Worms pin is approximate, and the Castle Church doors story is tradition.
In 1893 Fridtjof Nansen froze a purpose-built ship into the Arctic ice on purpose. His bet was that the pack would carry it across the top of the world, and the sceptics called it self-destruction.
This route follows the voyage from Vardø to the pack ice, the drift, the sledge dash to 86°14′N, a hard winter in a stone hut and a lucky meeting at Cape Flora, ending at the museum where the ship rests. Ocean and ice stops have no map pin.
Cut off from the rest of the country, Leningrad lived through the winter of 1941–42 on 125 grams of bread a day, half of it sawdust. This route follows the siege through the places that carried the city through: a fortress island, an ice road, a seed bank, a diary, a symphony.
It runs from the first day of the encirclement to the memorials that came after, and keeps to documented facts. Several stops are memorials: please visit with respect.
Two Dickens novels, one city of thieves' dens, prisons and cramped lodgings. Oliver Twist is dragged into Fagin's gang in the lanes of Holborn, while Pip of Great Expectations arrives from the Kent marshes expecting a soft white city and finds filth.
The route follows Oliver and Nancy from Saffron Hill to London Bridge, Jacob's Island and Newgate, then Pip from Cooling churchyard through Rochester to Little Britain and Barnard's Inn. Several places are traditional models rather than named settings, and each pin says so.
A Russian student expelled from university in 1864 ends up living among people in north-eastern New Guinea who had never seen a European. Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay was a zoologist and anthropologist, an early follower of Darwin who refuted the view that human races were different species.
The route follows him from Haeckel's Jena and the Canary Islands to Astrolabe Bay, the Sydney research station he founded, and his grave in St Petersburg. Most pins are approximate: the sources name regions, not camps.
Seventeen Moments of Spring sets Stierlitz in Berlin, but much was shot elsewhere: a Moscow park as the Bavarian Forest, Riga's old town and Meissen as Bern, hills near Tbilisi as the Alps.
This route follows the story through the places that played its settings, from a Moscow-region park posing as the Bavarian Forest to Riga, Meissen and the hills of Georgia standing in for Bern and the Alps. Every pin marks a stand-in, not a place from the plot.
The Romanovs' last journey runs from the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo to the governor's mansion in Tobolsk and the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, then to Ganina Yama and Porosyonkov Log. Sixteen months after Nicholas II's abdication, none of the family was alive.
The route follows that road from the Alexander Palace through the governor's house in Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg and the forest sites nearby, where the story ended and where it was later argued over. It is told plainly, and the final stops are places of mourning for many visitors.
In the early 1900s a Russian army surveyor, Vladimir Arsenyev, mapped the wild Ussuri taiga with the help of Dersu Uzala, an indigenous hunter who read the forest better than any map. Arsenyev's memoir became a classic, and Akira Kurosawa turned it into an Oscar-winning film in 1975.
The route follows the story from Vladivostok to Lake Khanka and the Sikhote-Alin, then to Khabarovsk, Dersu's lost grave and the film's shooting base. Pins mark regions and towns, not exact campsites.
White Sun of the Desert was filmed on Dagestan's Sarykum dune, the Caspian shore near Makhachkala, Turkmenistan's Karakum sands near Mary and at ancient Merv. Red Army soldier Sukhov only wants to go home to his wife, but the desert keeps handing him other people's problems.
The route follows the shoot in two expeditions: the Caspian shore and the Sarykum dune in Dagestan, then the Karakum sands and the ruins of Merv in Turkmenistan. Several stops are approximate, because the film's village was a temporary set.
In the summer of 1935 the young Laurie Lee left London for Spain with a violin and a single Spanish phrase. For a year he walked and played his way from Galicia to the Andalusian coast, sleeping under the open sky or in cheap posadas, welcomed even by the poorest villagers.
The route follows his memoir from Vigo through Zamora, Toledo, Tarifa and Málaga to Almuñécar, where he was rescued by a British destroyer as the Spanish Civil War began. Pins mark towns, not the roads he actually walked.
Michael Palin's Around the World in 80 Days (BBC, 1988) followed Phileas Fogg with no aircraft, from London's Reform Club to Venice, the Pyramids, Dubai, Hong Kong and Aspen. It ran from 25 September to 12 December and ended at a locked door in Pall Mall.
The route follows nine moments from his own day-by-day captions and diary excerpts: Venice, the Pyramids, a dhow from Dubai to Bombay, Hong Kong, a train to Shanghai, the Pacific, an Aspen balloon and a locked door in Pall Mall. Pins mark cities and landmarks; the real line of travel ran between them.
In 1973 Paul Theroux set out from London Victoria on a four-month railway loop through Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, then came back on the Trans-Siberian Railway. His travelogue, published in 1975, became a classic of the genre.
This route follows episodes the book's reviewers single out, from the Direct-Orient Express to Istanbul, Calcutta, Burma, Vietnam and Tokyo. The book's own text could not be checked, so some pins mark a city's station rather than a scene, and some places are not safe to visit now.
In the spring of 2004 Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman set out from London on motorcycles, heading east for New York with cinematographer Claudio von Planta. The ride ran from 14 April to 29 July and crossed twelve countries and 18,887 miles.
The route follows the highlights: a church built of bones in the Czech Republic, a UNICEF project in Mongolia, the mud of the Zilov Gap, the Road of Bones to Magadan, Mount Rushmore and the ride into New York. Pins mark places and areas; the real line of travel ran between them.
Amelia Earhart's last flight, 1937: from Oakland and Pearl Harbor to Miami, Lae in New Guinea and Howland Island, which she never reached, and on to Nikumaroro, where one theory says she came down. A crash in Hawaii and a lost radio signal made it one of history's great mysteries.
The route follows both attempts, from Oakland and Pearl Harbor to Miami, Lae and Howland Island, and ends at Nikumaroro, where one theory says she and her navigator came down. That final stop is only a hypothesis.
Disguised as a beggar, a Belgian-French explorer walked into the forbidden city of Lhasa among pilgrims. Alexandra David-Néel and her adopted son Yongden stayed two months in 1924, then slipped away before the governor could act.
The route follows her from Kumbum, where she studied for years, across the Kyi to the Potala and the Monlam crowds, then on to Samye, Tsetang and Gyantse. Pins are area-level, and critics have disputed her account since 1972.
