José Rizal, the Philippine national hero, was born in Calamba, exiled to Dapitan, imprisoned in Fort Santiago and shot at Bagumbayan, now Rizal Park in Manila, on 30 December 1896.
This route follows his life and death through six places: the reconstructed family house in Calamba, the shrine on his Dapitan estate, Fort Santiago in Intramuros, the execution ground at Luneta, his secret first grave at Paco Park and the monument that now holds his remains.
Thomas Hardy's Wessex is the real Dorset and Wiltshire under invented names: Puddletown becomes Weatherbury, Bere Regis becomes Kingsbere, and Stonehenge keeps its own name in Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
The route starts at Hardy's birthplace cottage and his house Max Gate, then follows his novels to the real villages and ancient sites behind them: Puddletown, Maiden Castle, Bere Regis and finally Stonehenge. Hardy himself called Wessex a "partly real, partly dream-country", so some pins mark the area rather than one building.
The legend of Shuten-dōji, the ogre-king of Mount Ōe, is tied to shrines and temples in and around Kyoto: Iwashimizu Hachimangū, Sumiyoshi Taisha, the Ōeyama range, Byōdō-in and Nariai-ji.
In the story, abductions plague the capital and the warrior Raikō leads a band against the ogre-king. The route follows the hunt from prayers at the shrines to the lair, the beheading and the places that claim the head or the sake. Versions differ, and the exact mountain is disputed.
Momotarō, Japan's peach-born ogre-slayer, is tied to Okayama through the legend of the ogre Ura, Mount Kijo's fortress, Kibitsu Shrine and Megijima, the island of caves linked to Onigashima.
The route follows the Ura legend from the hilltop fortress to the shrines of Prince Kibitsuhiko, then the island of ogres and the statue at Okayama Station. The Okayama link to the tale is modern, and some stops are traditional identifications.
Roald Amundsen's Gjøa expedition of 1903–06 was the first to sail through the Northwest Passage, from Beechey Island and Gjoa Haven in Arctic Canada to Nome in Alaska. Today the little herring boat sits in the Fram Museum in Oslo.
The route follows the voyage stop by stop: the Franklin memorial at Beechey Island, two winters at King William Island, a long ski trip to the telegraph at Eagle, the arrival in Nome, Gjøa's decades in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, and her return to Norway.
Conan the Barbarian was filmed across Spain: the Cimmerian village at Valsaín, the Wheel of Pain near Solosancho, the witch's rocks at the Ciudad Encantada, and the deserts, dunes and salt marshes of Almería.
The Hyborian Age is invented; every stop here is a real place. The route follows the film from the raid on Conan's village to the Mountain of Power, and ends at Shepperton Studios in England, where an older King Conan speaks the closing lines.
Stand by Me moves King's Castle Rock from Maine to Oregon: Rob Reiner shot the 1986 film in Brownsville, along the Row River railway and at a California trestle. Four boys walk out of town to find a missing boy's body, and the trip changes them.
This route follows the film in story order, from Brownsville's Main Street and the treehouse to the saloon and diner where the trip is set in motion, the Row River Trail bridge near Cottage Grove, a Junction City general store, the 80-foot trestle above Lake Britton and the Calapooia River bridge where the boys part. Most stops are in Oregon; the trestle is in California.
In 1819 Bolívar led an army from the flooded Llanos over the Páramo de Pisba, a pass 3,960 metres high that had been left unguarded because it seemed impassable. Weeks later he won at Boyacá and entered Santa Fe.
The route follows him from the Congress of Angostura through the freezing crossing, the standoff at Gámeza and the lancers' charge at Vargas Swamp to the Boyacá bridge and the capital. Several stops are approximate, since the sources name regions rather than exact spots.
In 1961 Yuri Gagarin trained at Moscow's Khodynka Airfield, launched from Baikonur and came down near Engels. Less than two hours in space made the pilot a worldwide celebrity; his capsule is kept in a museum in Korolev City.
This route follows Yuri Gagarin from the training ground at Moscow's Khodynka Airfield to the launch pad at Baikonur, the field in the Saratov region where he came down, the Kremlin ceremony and the museum that keeps his capsule. The museum pin marks the Energia company site rather than the museum itself.
The Kanto of Pokémon Red and Blue is based on the real Kantō region of Japan: fans match Pallet Town to Machida, Vermilion City to Yokohama, Celadon City to Shinjuku and Lavender Town to Narita. You start in a quiet town, beat eight gym leaders and take on Team Rocket.
This route follows the game's journey from Pallet Town to the final gym and sets each stop beside the real place it is said to resemble. The game's Kanto is inspired by the real one, not a copy of it, so every pin is an outside reading of the map, not an official location.
A chance meeting at the Criterion Bar sends an army doctor just back from Afghanistan to a laboratory at St Bartholomew's Hospital, where a stranger grips his hand and observes: "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive." Within days Dr Watson has moved into 221B Baker Street, the address where many of the stories begin, and off runs the canon: four novels and 56 short stories, all but one set between 1880 and 1914.
This route walks Holmes's London in the order the stories appeared: the Criterion where Watson met Stamford, the hospital of the famous first deduction, the Baker Street rooms that did not exist when Doyle wrote and are now a museum, Scotland Yard's Victorian headquarters on the Embankment, a society church where a bride vanishes, a silent club on Pall Mall, and the Underground station where a body fell from a train roof.
The Motorcycle Diaries follows Ernesto Guevara and Alberto Granado's 1952 journey from Buenos Aires across South America — Valparaíso, the Chuquicamata copper mine, Machu Picchu, the San Pablo leper colony on the Amazon — to Caracas. Their overloaded Norton died in Chile; the poverty they saw on the way changed Guevara.
Guevara's diary of the trip, published decades later as The Motorcycle Diaries, records how poverty, exploited miners and the lepers they worked with changed him; within a few years he was "Che", a leader of the Cuban Revolution. The route follows the journey from both men's accounts as summarised by historians.
