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.
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.
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.
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.
You start in a quiet town, pick a starter, beat eight gym leaders and take on Team Rocket. The Kanto of Pokémon Red and Blue is invented, yet it is based on the real Kantō region of Japan, and fans have spent decades matching its towns to real places.
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.
Season 3 of The White Lotus follows wealthy guests and staff at a Thai wellness resort. It opens with gunshots and a body in a lake, then rewinds a week. Mike White wrote and directed all eight episodes, filmed from February to August 2024 in Bangkok, Phuket and Ko Samui.
This route visits six real places in story order, from the Four Seasons on Ko Samui to a Bangkok hotel and a Muay Thai stadium. The on-screen resort was stitched together from several hotels, so no single place is the White Lotus.
King Arthur belongs to no single place. His story was built up by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Thomas Malory and many others, and this route follows it in the legend's own order: Merlin's dragons, Arthur's conception and coronation, his battles and court, the last fight, the sword in the water and Avalon.
Every pin marks a real place that tradition has attached to an episode, not a site proven by history, and each stop says where the link is doubted.
Agatha Christie's 1937 mystery puts Hercule Poirot on holiday in Aswan, waiting to board the Nile steamer Karnak. Among his fellow passengers are a jilted woman stalking her ex-fiancé's honeymoon, her former friend the heiress, and a boulder that comes uncomfortably close to the bride.
The route follows the steamer from Aswan to Wadi Halfa and ends at Karnak, where the 1978 film moves the falling stone. The novel itself puts that scene at Abu Simbel.
Victor Hugo's 1862 novel follows the convict Jean Valjean from the night a bishop's kindness turns him towards good, through years as a respected factory owner and the rescuer of a child, to the street fighting of June 1832. This route follows that path from a bishop's town in the south to the sewers and bridges of Paris.
Hugo hid two of the towns behind initials and the wine-shop barricade has been built over, so only the Luxembourg Garden is pinned exactly; the other stops mark real places standing in for the book's.
Ghost of Yōtei follows Atsu, a wandering mercenary who returns to Ezo — modern-day Hokkaido — in 1603 to hunt down the Yōtei Six, the band led by the samurai lord Nariaki Saito who slaughtered her family sixteen years earlier. Her revenge carries her across an island modelled on Hokkaido, from the grasslands at Mount Yōtei's foot to the frozen north and the Matsumae clan's castle in the south.
This route follows the game's regions and their real counterparts: the Yotei Grasslands around Lake Shikotsu, the Ishikari Plain, the Ainu country of the Nayoro Wilds, the Kitsune's Teshio Ridge, and the Tokachi Range, with Mount Yōtei and Matsumae Castle as its fixed points.
Gotham is Chicago. The film shot most of Batman's city on real streets and buildings in the Loop, dressing them up as Gotham, then flew the crew to Hong Kong for its one overseas detour. This route follows The Dark Knight in order, from the bank heist that opens it to the rooftop where Batman and the Joker have their last fight.
Along the way: the disused post office that doubled as a bank, the glass office where Wayne holds a fundraiser, the financial street of the convoy chase, the hospital the Joker destroys, an old Chicago bar, the pier where two ferries wait, and Hong Kong's International Finance Centre.
Forza Horizon 4, released on 2 October 2018, turns Great Britain into one giant racetrack: an open world with condensed representations of Edinburgh, the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District and the Cotswolds, where seasons change every week and Derwentwater freezes hard enough to drive across. Microsoft counted 24 million players by November 2020, and Polygon found the game world a theme-park version of England where everything has "the faint whiff of an idealised 1950s about it, a place of ordered pub gardens and rosebushes".
This route drives the real Britain behind the game, north to south: Edinburgh's Old Town, Bamburgh Castle on its coastal crag, three Lake District stops at Derwentwater, Ambleside and Tarn Hows, and the honey-coloured village of Broadway in the Cotswolds. Every stop can be visited today.
The 1965 film of Maria von Trapp's life was shot on real locations around Salzburg between March and September 1964, and almost all of them can still be visited. This route follows Maria from the mountain meadow and her abbey through the fountains and gardens of the song sequences to the villa terrace, the wedding church and the festival hall where the family sings its way to freedom.
The stops run in story order, from the Bavarian opening to the festival escape. One caveat: the famous cemetery hiding place never existed; it was a Hollywood studio set modelled on St Peter's Graveyard.
Tommy sets out for Seattle to hunt Abby, and Ellie and Dina follow him into a ruined city where the WLF militia and a cult, the Seraphites, fight for control. The Last of Us Part II plays the same three days twice: first as Ellie, then as Abby. The city is the real one: Naughty Dog chose Seattle for its hills and varied weather, and its artists travelled there to study the architecture, vegetation and topography.
This route follows both runs. Ellie's: the synagogue they call the Dome, the Pinnacle Theatre, the convention centre and its stalkers, the hospital and the aquarium. Abby's: the stadium she lives in, the Great Wheel of her memories, the Chinatown Gate and the Space Needle seen from the island. Many of the game's buildings carry new names; each stop names the real one behind it.
Daniel Craig's first Bond bleeds, loses at cards and gets his boss a dressing-down, and the film's geography plays tricks of its own: Montenegro is a Czech spa town, Madagascar is an abandoned building site in Nassau, and the House of Commons is a monastery library in Prague.
The route follows the film from the black-and-white opening in a Prague office block to the digger chase on a Bahamian building site, a Paradise Island resort, the casino and hotel of Karlovy Vary, the Lake Como villa where Bond recovers from poison, the Venetian palazzo that sinks with Vesper inside, and the Lake Como house where Bond finally gives his name. Two stops are hotels and one is a monastery library you can walk into; the digger site is now inside a military base.
Tatooine is the Star Wars desert everyone knows, but the films kept finding other corners of the Earth for their galaxy: redwoods in northern California, a villa on Lake Como, a plaza in Seville, the desert around an oasis in Abu Dhabi, a monastery island off County Kerry and the largest salt flat in the world, in Bolivia.
This route follows the shooting in the order the films were made, from the Endor forest of Return of the Jedi to the Crait battle of The Last Jedi. Two stops mark an area rather than a spot: the Endor scenes were partly shot on private land, and no source names the stretch of desert that stood in for Jakku.
A gentleman of La Mancha, a head full of chivalry books, a plain full of mills: this route follows Don Quixote from the village argued to be his to the strand of Barcelona, keeping the order of the book.
It begins with the village whose name the narrator refuses to give, the inn where a landlord reading from his account book dubs him a knight, and the ridge of mills that shivered his lance to pieces. In Part II it follows him to Dulcinea's town by night, the cave where he sleeps an hour and believes three days have passed, the lakes of Ruidera, and finally Barcelona, where galley crews salute him three times and a bachelor from his own village unhorses him.
Which mills he charged, and where the inn of that first night stood, are guesses: Campo de Criptana and Puerto Lápice are the usual answers.
A jazz pianist and an aspiring actress argue through the windows of their cars in a Los Angeles traffic jam, and the city itself becomes the romance: a night on a funicular, a broken projector, a kiss in a planetarium. Damien Chazelle shot La La Land in 40 days across Los Angeles in the summer of 2015, and most of the places the couple reaches for are still there.
This route follows Mia and Sebastian from the freeway ramps where they shout at each other to the jazz bar Seb finally gets to open — the 105/110 connector ramps, the Burbank café on the Warner lot, the Lighthouse Café and the pier beside it, the Rialto in South Pasadena, Griffith Observatory and Angels Flight. The film rarely names its own locations, so a few pins mark the real building that stood in for the one on screen.
Taki, a Tokyo schoolboy who waits tables in Shinjuku, keeps waking up in the body of Mitsuha, a shrine maiden in a mountain town who has never left it. They leave notes on each other's skin, fall for each other from a distance — and then the switching stops dead. Taki rides west with two friends to find the town he can only draw from memory, and finds it gone: a fragment of a comet took Itomori and five hundred people three years before his visit.
The town was invented, but the film stands on real ground: the Shinjuku where Taki lives and works, the Hida valley that lent Itomori its backdrop, the lake generally credited with the crater pool, and the stone staircase where the story ends. One caveat: Itomori was never filmed, so its crater is the one stop here without a pin.
In the summer of 1983 a seventeen-year-old boy and a twenty-four-year-old American share a house in rural Lombardy: Elio Perlman, who reads too much and plays the piano too well, and Oliver, the graduate student his father hired for the summer. One long, hot, awkward season, and neither of them handles it gracefully. It ends with a telephone call and a boy by a fireplace; it was shot, almost scene by scene, in real places you can still stand in.
This route follows the filming from the Perlmans' villa at Moscazzano through Crema's piazza, a Roman villa on Lake Garda and a war memorial at Pandino, out to the meadow at Capralba where Elio makes his move, and then north for the last three days in Bergamo — the country's tallest waterfall, a pensione in the upper town, a drunken night outside Santa Maria Maggiore, and the small station south of Crema that stands in for Clusone. Principal photography ran from 9 May to the end of June 2016, and the villa is a private home, so a few stops are best seen from the street.
A smuggler named Joel is hired to carry fourteen-year-old Ellie — possibly immune to the fungus that ended the world — across a ruined America, from the Boston quarantine zone to a hospital in Salt Lake City. What starts as a delivery job becomes the closest thing either of them has left to family, ending in a hospital corridor with an impossible choice.
This route follows their road west in story order: outbreak night in Austin, the Boston handoff, Bill's trapped town, the Pittsburgh ambush, Tommy's dam settlement at Jackson, the deserted university in Colorado and the Salt Lake City hospital. The cities are real but the story sites are placed approximately, with real landmarks as pins.
After a job goes horribly wrong in London, two Irish hitmen are ordered to lie low in Bruges and wait for a phone call. Ken finds the city beautiful; Ray is bored rigid and says so at every turn. Martin McDonagh's 2008 dark comedy was shot entirely on location in the city in February and March 2007.
This route follows Ken and Ray through the medieval centre: their hotel, the Belfry, a church with a relic, Bosch's vision of hell in the Groeninge Museum, a park, the Lake of Love and the street where the story ends. One scene was shot in a stand-in church, and the top of the tower was a studio set.
Two branches of one royal family, the five Pandava brothers and their hundred Kaurava cousins, quarrel over the throne of the Kuru kingdom. The Pandavas survive a murder plot, win the princess Draupadi, build a splendid capital, lose everything in a rigged game of dice and spend thirteen years in exile before the families meet in an eighteen-day war at Kurukshetra. The Sanskrit epic, one of the longest poems ever composed, also holds the Bhagavad Gita.
Northern India is dotted with places that tradition links to the story, several of them with real Iron Age remains. This route follows the Pandavas through those traditional sites. They are identifications of faith and local memory; archaeology has found ancient towns, but not the epic's events.
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.
