Catalog
54 routes found
Walking the island of Shikoku from temple to temple, in the footsteps of the monk Kūkai, is one of Japan's oldest pilgrimages. This route visits seven of the 88 temples, from Temple 1 in Tokushima to the finish at Temple 88, passing the four provinces, Kūkai's birthplace and the highest temple. The legends here are temple tradition, not proven history.
For over a thousand years, emperors, samurai and ordinary people have walked mountain trails to three shrines of the ancient syncretic Kumano religion. Emperor Go-Shirakawa alone made the trip 34 times, and in the Muromachi period the stream of walkers was called a "pilgrimage of ants". This route follows the Nakahechi from Takijiri-oji through Chikatsuyu and Hongū, by river to Shingū, then to Nachi's stone steps and waterfall. Some stops are pinned to the area rather than a surveyed spot.
In 1832 the printmaker Hiroshige travelled the Tōkaidō, the road from Edo to Kyoto, and made it into The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. This route follows seven of his prints, from the bridge where the road began to the bridge where it ended. Each stop pairs a print with what is there today: a rebuilt checkpoint, a long river bridge, a shrine, a preserved post town. Scholars debate whether Hiroshige saw every station himself, so the pins mark the places, not his exact viewpoints.
In July 1911 a Yale lecturer went looking for the last capital of the Incas and found Machu Picchu instead, guided by a Peruvian innkeeper and a farmer's young son. The route follows the Yale Peruvian Expedition from Cusco down the Urubamba to the ruins, then on to Vitcos and Espíritu Pampa, where the real answer sat unrecognised. The city had already been visited locally, and Bingham's conclusion about it proved mistaken.
The French Way is the most popular route of the ancient pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, It starts at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, crosses the Pyrenees, and from Roncesvalles on the Spanish side still runs about 780 kilometres west to Galicia. It is on the UNESCO World Heritage List. This route follows it through seven landmarks: a mountain gate, a village of legend, a pilgrims' bridge, a great cathedral, a knights' tournament, a Galician hilltop and the tomb of St James.
In 1466 or 1468 a merchant from Tver set out down the Volga to trade around the Caspian Sea. He was robbed on the way, crossed Persia, sailed from Hormuz to India and wrote down what he saw in A Journey Beyond the Three Seas. This route follows him from Tver through Derbent, Hormuz and the coast of India to Bidar, and home to Caffa on the Black Sea. Dates are debated, and most stops are marked by area only because his notes name towns rather than buildings.
In the spring of 1890 the playwright and doctor Anton Chekhov left Moscow, crossed Siberia and sailed to Sakhalin, a convict island north of Japan, to count its inhabitants one by one. He kept the plan secret until January, travelled 82 days across Siberia, and came home months later by sea. The route follows his way from his Moscow house through Tomsk, Irkutsk and the Amur to the penal posts of Sakhalin and back to Vladivostok. Several pins mark whole towns, because Chekhov's lodgings are not recorded.
In June 1867 the steamship Quaker City left New York on what Mark Twain called his "Great Pleasure Excursion", a chartered trip to Europe and the Holy Land. A newspaper, the Alta California, paid for his place in exchange for fifty articles, and those letters grew into The Innocents Abroad. This route follows eight stops: the Wall Street pier, the Azores, Tangier, Milan, Athens, a palace garden near Yalta, Jerusalem and the Sphinx. Each is told through Twain's own scenes, from donkey rides and hotel bills to the places that stopped his jokes. Where he does not name a spot, the pin marks the nearest known place.
On 16 July 1969 a Saturn V lifted the Apollo 11 crew off a Florida launch pad; eight days later their capsule dropped into the Pacific. In between, the first people walked on another world while an estimated 600 million watched on Earth. The route follows the mission through six stops: the launch pad in Florida, Mission Control in Houston, Tranquility Base on the Moon, the Australian dish that carried the moonwalk pictures, the splashdown and the capsule's museum home. The Moon stop has no pin because the map shows Earth only; its lunar coordinates are given in the text.
In December 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the Hook of Holland to walk to Constantinople, carrying a few clothes, some letters of introduction, an anthology of English verse and a volume of Horace. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but gentry and aristocracy kept inviting him into their country houses. He wrote the journey up decades later in A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road. The route follows him through ten places the sources let us pin, from the Hook and a Stuttgart apartment to Melk, Vienna, Prague, the bridge into Hungary, an island on the Danube that now lies under water, Plovdiv and Istanbul. Many pins are approximate: the sources name a town, not the exact spot where he stood.
In June 1995 Cheryl Strayed, 26 and with no hiking experience, set out alone to walk 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. Her memoir Wild reached No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list, and Reese Witherspoon played her in the 2014 film. This route follows the hike north from the Mojave Desert to the Columbia River, using the memoir's outline and the film's best-known scenes. The film compresses and dramatises, so stops drawn from it say so, and pins mark areas rather than campsites.
In 1960 the novelist John Steinbeck fitted a pickup truck with a camper shell, named it Rocinante and set out from Long Island with his poodle, Charley. He wanted to see his country because he made his living writing about it, and his main question was what Americans are like today. This route follows eight stops of the outer loop, from Sag Harbor through Maine, Niagara Falls and Minnesota to Montana, Yellowstone and Steinbeck's native Salinas Valley, then down to New Orleans. The book is a novelist's account: it has been challenged as partly fictionalised, so read the encounters as stories and the places as real.
On 10 November 1871, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, the journalist Henry M. Stanley took off his hat in front of a crowd and said, as he tells it in his own book, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" The explorer many thought dead had been found, after nearly eight months on the road from the coast. The route follows Stanley's account, How I Found Livingstone, over eight stops: from Zanzibar and Bagamoyo through Mpwapwa, Tabora and the Malagarasi to Ujiji, then up the lake to Mugere and back to the parting at Tabora. Stanley's camps are rarely identifiable today, so every pin is approximate.
At 11:30 a.m. on 29 May 1953 Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stood on the summit of Mount Everest, the first people confirmed to have done so. They were part of a British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt, which in the end amounted to over four hundred men, including twenty Sherpa guides and 362 porters. The route follows that expedition from winter training in Wales through Kathmandu, Thyangboche, Base Camp, the Khumbu Icefall, the Western Cwm and the South Col to the summit, then to the telegraph runner's stop at Namche Bazaar. Pins above Base Camp mark the terrain, not the exact camps of 1953.
In 1910 two expeditions set out for the bottom of the world. Roald Amundsen's Norwegians, masters of skis and sled dogs, reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911. Robert Falcon Scott's party arrived on 17 January 1912, 34 days later, to find a Norwegian tent already standing. Amundsen sent his news from Hobart; Scott's party of five died on the return journey. The route follows both men from Cardiff and Madeira to their bases, up their two glaciers, to the Pole and to the endings: Amundsen's cables from Hobart and Scott's last camp. Antarctic pins mark glaciers and bays, not camps, and the ice has moved since.
On 26 August 1768 the Endeavour left Plymouth with 94 people aboard, bound for Tahiti to watch Venus cross the Sun. Almost three years later she anchored off the Kent coast again, having reached New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, and with many of her people lost to disease on the way home. The route follows James Cook's own journal and modern accounts through ten stops, from the anchorage at Plymouth to the Great Barrier Reef and Batavia. Dates follow modern accounts, which sometimes differ by a day from the journal.
In May 1804 William Clark and about 30 others left a winter camp on the Mississippi and turned up the Missouri, the first stage of an expedition sent to cross the newly acquired western part of the country. Captains Meriwether Lewis and Clark kept journals, and many of their entries are quoted here in their own spelling. The route follows them from Camp Dubois past a sergeant's grave, a tense standoff with the Teton Sioux, a winter at Fort Mandan, the Great Falls, the Continental Divide and the snowbound Lolo Trail to the Pacific, then home by way of Clark's signature on Pompeys Pillar. Where a camp is lost to the river or to time, the pin marks the nearest place you can visit.
In 1271 a seventeen-year-old Venetian set out with his father and uncle for the court of Kublai Khan and did not come home for 24 years. Years later, in a Genoese prison, he dictated what he had seen to a fellow inmate, and The Travels of Marco Polo was the result. The route follows the book from Venice and Acre to the Persian Gulf, across the Pamir highlands and the desert to Kublai's summer and winter capitals, south to Hangzhou and the port of Zayton, and home again. Some of the roads are reconstructed by scholars, and Polo sometimes exaggerates, so each stop notes where the evidence is thin.
On 20 September 1519 five ships and about 270 men sailed from Spain to find a western sea road to the Spice Islands. Magellan died in the Philippines, but Juan Sebastián Elcano brought the Victoria home three years later with eighteen survivors and 26 tons of spices, having sailed all the way around the world. The route follows the voyage from the mouth of the Guadalquivir past Port St. Julian, through the strait and across the Pacific to the Moluccas, then home past the Cape of Good Hope. Anchorages are often unrecorded, so most pins mark the nearest known place; the dates come from Pigafetta's journal and modern accounts.
In January 1952 Ernesto Guevara, a 23-year-old medical student from Buenos Aires, and his friend Alberto Granado, a 29-year-old biochemist, set off to cross South America on an old 1939 Norton 500 they called La Poderosa, "The Mighty One". The bike died in Chile, and they went on by truck, steamer, raft, horse and on foot — some 8,000 kilometres in about nine months, ending at a leper colony on the Amazon and in Caracas. 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.
In April 1947 the Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl and five companions pushed off from Peru on a raft of nine balsa logs, built in the style of old Spanish drawings of South American rafts. They meant to prove that ancient people could have drifted from South America to Polynesia. After 101 days and almost 7,000 kilometres on the open Pacific, they crashed onto a coral reef in the Tuamotus — and all six walked ashore. The voyage became a bestselling book and an Oscar-winning documentary. Heyerdahl's theory, though, has not survived: archaeology, language and genetics show that Polynesians came from the west, from Island Southeast Asia, as master navigators. The route follows the raft from Callao to Tahiti.
In May 1846 Ida Pfeiffer, a 48-year-old Viennese widow with grown-up sons and very little money, set off to go round the world — mostly alone, on cargo ships, on horseback and with caravans. She came home two and a half years later, in the middle of a revolution, and turned her diaries into a bestseller translated into seven languages. The Royal Geographical Society in London would not admit her, because it did not accept women. The route follows her first world journey in order, from her own book, A Woman's Journey Round the World: Hamburg, the Brazilian forest, Cape Horn and Valparaíso, Tahiti, Canton, Baghdad, Persia and home. There are no visitor tips for Iraq or Iran.
In 629 a young Chinese Buddhist monk, troubled by contradictions between the Chinese translations of the scriptures, slipped out of the Tang capital in defiance of a ban on foreign travel and set off for India to find the original texts. Xuanzang crossed the Taklamakan's edge, the Tian Shan and the Hindu Kush, studied for years in India's great monastery at Nalanda, and came home sixteen years later with 657 Sanskrit texts carried by a train of horses. His travel record, the Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, is still a key source for the history of Central Asia and India, and his journey inspired the classic novel Journey to the West. The route follows him there and back. There are no travel tips for Afghanistan.
In December 1831 a 22-year-old Cambridge graduate with a passion for beetles and rocks sailed from Plymouth as an unpaid naturalist on HMS Beagle, a ten-gun survey brig. The voyage was meant to take two years and took five. Charles Darwin came home with crates of fossils, skins and notebooks — and with questions about the islands that would lead him, two decades later, to On the Origin of Species. The route follows the ship around the world in order, using Darwin's own Journal of Researches for dates and details: the volcanic Cape Verde islands, the Brazilian forest, the fossil beds of Argentina, Tierra del Fuego, a great Chilean earthquake, the Galápagos, Cape Town and home to Falmouth.