On the eve of his coronation, Prince Rama of Ayodhya is sent into the forest for fourteen years, so that his stepmother's son can rule. His wife Sita and brother Lakshmana go with him. In the forest Sita is carried off by Ravana, the demon king of Lanka, and Rama, helped by Hanuman and an army of vanaras, monkey-like forest people, crosses the sea to win her back. The Sanskrit epic attributed to Valmiki runs to some 24,000 verses and is still retold, staged and worshipped across South and Southeast Asia.
For centuries pilgrims have tied its episodes to real places, from Ayodhya to the hills of Sri Lanka. This route follows those traditional identifications, which are matters of faith and local memory rather than archaeology. Most of the stops are living temples.
King Pelias sends his nephew Jason to fetch the Golden Fleece from Colchis, at the far end of the Black Sea, hoping he will never come back. Jason builds the Argo, gathers the greatest heroes of his day, Heracles among them, and sails east. Apollonius of Rhodes told the voyage in his Argonautica in the 3rd century BC, and he filled it with real coasts, harbours and local legends.
This route follows the outward voyage to Colchis. The way home is left out: ancient writers sent the Argo back by wildly different routes, up rivers into the Adriatic and even across Libya. The heroes and the fleece are myth; the shores, islands and ancient cities are real. Quotations are from R. C. Seaton's 1912 translation.
1937, between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. A giant breaks into Marshall College, steals a mummified cat and knocks out Indiana Jones. The trail leads Indy to a "Great Circle" of sacred sites spaced evenly around the globe, and into a race against the Nazi archaeologist Emmerich Voss to unlock its power. Todd Howard conceived the story of MachineGames' 2024 game, and its director pictured it as a "lost Indiana Jones adventure from the 1980s".
The circle and its secret are pure adventure fiction, but its stops are real: the Vatican, Giza, wartime Shanghai, the ruined Thai capital of Sukhothai and the ziggurat of Ur. The designers rebuilt them from books and photographs as they would have looked in the 1930s. This route follows the main story.
The year is 2281, two centuries after a nuclear war. A courier carrying a mysterious platinum poker chip to New Vegas is shot in the head and left in a shallow grave — and survives. Obsidian's 2010 role-playing game follows the courier's hunt for the man who did it, into a war for the Mojave between the New California Republic, Caesar's slaver Legion and Mr. House, the hidden ruler of the Strip.
The designers built the map from US Geological Survey data and photographs of the real desert, so the game's road south from Goodsprings and back up to Las Vegas runs through real towns. The route follows that road. The towns' massacres, radiation and battles are fiction; their saloons, roller coasters and dam are not.
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 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.
In June 1325 a 21-year-old law student left Tangier to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. He did not come home for 24 years. Ibn Battuta crossed the Islamic world and beyond — Arabia, East Africa, Anatolia, Central Asia, India, the Maldives, Sumatra and China — earning his keep as a judge and a guest of sultans, marrying and divorcing along the way. By some estimates he covered about 117,000 kilometres, more than any traveller before the age of steam.
Back in Morocco he dictated his memories, the Rihla, to a scholar who polished them and borrowed passages from older books, so not every scene was his own. The route picks out nine stops in the order he reached them; it is not one continuous road. There are no travel tips for Mecca or Mali.
In Wes Anderson's 2014 comedy, the concierge M. Gustave and his lobby boy Zero are caught up in a murder, a stolen painting and a war in the imaginary alpine republic of Zubrowka. The pink hotel on its crag is a model; almost everything else was shot in winter 2013 in eastern Germany, in and around the border town of Görlitz and across Saxony.
This route visits the real buildings: an empty Art Nouveau department store that became the hotel lobby, a shuttered concert hall, two castles that make up Madame D.'s estate, a former prison, the most beautiful dairy shop in the world and Dresden's baroque Zwinger. Zubrowka is fictional; these are the filming locations.
Saeed and Nadia fall in love in a city sliding into civil war. Then rumours spread of black doors that open somewhere else in the world, and the couple pay their way through one. Mohsin Hamid's 2017 novel skips the dangerous journeys refugees usually make and keeps only the arrivals: a Greek island, a mansion in London, the hills of northern California.
The doors are magic, but Hamid calls the book "geographically autobiographical": every stop is a place he has lived in or loved. The home city is never named, though he says it was based in many ways on Lahore, so that pin is speculative.
May 1914. Richard Hannay, bored in London after years in southern Africa, lets a frightened American into his flat — and a few days later finds him dead on the floor with a knife through his heart. Wanted for murder and hunted by a German spy ring, Hannay has three weeks to survive until he can warn the government. He runs for the moors of Galloway, then back south to a meeting of ministers and a Kent clifftop.
This is John Buchan's 1915 novel, not Hitchcock's very different film. London, St Pancras, Cairnsmore of Fleet and Moffat are named in the book; Hannay's hiding places on the moors and the Kent resort of Bradgate are not real, but the steps that gave the book its title are.
In May 1863 a Hamburg professor of mineralogy decodes a 300-year-old note in runes: go down the crater of Snæfell in Iceland and you will reach the centre of the Earth. Within days he drags his reluctant nephew Axel north by train, steamer and schooner, hires a silent Icelandic guide named Hans and climbs into the volcano.
Verne sets up the impossible with a timetable you could almost follow today — Altona station, Kiel, Copenhagen, Reykjavík, the hamlet of Stapi below the glacier. What happens underground is pure fiction, but the way out is real: three months later the travellers are spat out of Stromboli, an island volcano off Sicily, more than 3,000 km from where they went in.
A young English solicitor travels to the Carpathians to sell a London house to a nobleman — and becomes his prisoner. The Count then ships himself to England in fifty boxes of earth, comes ashore in a Yorkshire storm and starts hunting in London, until a small band led by Professor Van Helsing chases him all the way back to his mountains.
Stoker never visited Transylvania; he built its geography from books and maps, and the English half from places he knew. The route follows the novel's diaries and letters stop by stop: the inn at Bistritz, the Borgo Pass, the Black Sea port of Varna, the harbour, steps and churchyard of Whitby, Purfleet on the Thames, London Zoo and the final race up the Danube at Galatz.
On 16 June 1994 an American, Jesse, and a French student, Céline, meet on a train from Budapest. He talks her into getting off with him in Vienna, and with no money for a hotel they walk the city all night, talking about love, death and everything else until his flight leaves in the morning. Richard Linklater's 1995 film was shot entirely in Vienna and began a trilogy that continued in Before Sunset and Before Midnight.
The film strings its locations together as if they were a single walk; in reality they are scattered across the city, from the outer districts to the Danube. This route visits them in the order of the night.
