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.
Dracula crosses Transylvania's Borgo Pass and Whitby's harbour, steps and churchyard, then Purfleet on the Thames and London Zoo. A young English solicitor becomes the Count's prisoner; Dracula ships himself to England in fifty boxes of earth and is hunted back to his mountains by Van Helsing's band.
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.
Peter Jackson shot all three Lord of the Rings films at once, in 438 days between October 1999 and December 2000, at more than 150 locations across New Zealand's North and South Islands. Farmland became the Shire, a regional park became Rivendell, a lonely hill in Canterbury became the capital of Rohan, and a volcano in Tongariro National Park stood in for Mount Doom.
This route follows Frodo's story through eight of those places, most of them easy to visit. Some sets were rebuilt for visitors; others were removed and the land returned to how it was. The mountains of Tongariro are sacred to local Māori, so please admire the summits from below.
On the evening of 2 October 1872, the punctual and unflappable Phileas Fogg bets his fellow members of the Reform Club £20,000 — half his fortune — that he can go around the world in eighty days, and leaves that same night with his new French valet, Passepartout. On his heels comes Detective Fix, convinced that Fogg is a bank robber on the run. Jules Verne's novel appeared in 1872, when the opening of the Suez Canal and new railways across India and America had made such a race against the timetable just about possible.
The route follows the journey eastward in the novel's own dates, from Pall Mall back to Pall Mall.
