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.
Greece, 431 BC: Athens and Sparta are tearing the Greek world apart, and you are a Spartan mercenary caught between them. Assassin's Creed Odyssey sends you across the Aegean with a broken spear and an eagle at your side, hunting your lost family and the masked Cult of Kosmos that destroyed it.
This route follows the Eagle Bearer's trail from the hot gates of Thermopylae to the oracle at Delphi, the Acropolis of Athens, the sanctuary at Olympia, warrior Sparta and finally Mount Taygetos. Every stop is a real place you can visit, recreated in the game's vast open world.
Bond is shot off a train in Turkey and left for dead, while a former agent with a grudge against M attacks MI6 from within. Sam Mendes's 2012 film — the 23rd Bond and the highest-grossing of them all — was shot between November 2011 and May 2012 in London, Turkey and Scotland, with much of "Shanghai" and "Macau" faked in England.
The route follows the story from the rooftops of the Grand Bazaar to the railway viaduct where Bond falls, a beach bar in Fethiye, MI6's real headquarters, a Turner in the National Gallery, an abandoned Japanese island, a disused Tube platform and the glen where Bond takes M home. Skyfall Lodge itself was a set in Surrey.
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.
One night at Cruachan, Queen Medb of Connacht and her husband Ailill compare their riches and find them equal in all but one thing: Ailill owns a magnificent white-horned bull. Medb sets out to take an even finer one, the Brown Bull of Cooley, from Ulster, whose warriors are all laid low by an ancient curse. Only the seventeen-year-old Cú Chulainn stands in her way, holding off her army ford by ford, one champion a day.
The Táin Bó Cúailnge, "the Cattle Raid of Cooley", is the centrepiece of Ireland's Ulster Cycle, preserved in manuscripts from the 12th century on. Its storytellers loved explaining place-names, and many of its places are real and visitable. This route follows the raid from Connacht to Cooley and the bull's last journey home. Quotations are from Joseph Dunn's 1914 translation.
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.
Troy has fallen. Aeneas, a Trojan prince, carries his old father out of the burning city and sets sail with the survivors to find the new homeland the gods have promised them. Virgil's Aeneid, written for Augustus in the 20s BC, follows years of wrong turns, storms and prophecies until the exiles land in Italy, where their descendants will one day found Rome.
This route follows the voyage in the order it happens, which is not the order Virgil tells it: the poem opens in Carthage and lets Aeneas recount the earlier wanderings to Queen Dido. Every stop is a real ancient site, most now open as archaeological parks; Aeneas himself belongs to legend. Quotations are from John Dryden's 1697 translation.
In August 1914 France expels its German residents, and Karl is torn from his French wife Marie and their baby on a farm near Saint-Mihiel and drafted into the German army. Marie's father Emile is called up on the other side. Ubisoft Montpellier's hand-drawn 2014 game, made for the war's centenary, follows them, an American volunteer called Freddie, a Belgian nurse, Anna, and Walt the medic dog across four years of the Western Front.
The heroes are invented, but the battles are not, and every chapter is full of real objects and short historical notes. This route visits the places the story passes through, from the Marne in 1914 to the Chemin des Dames in 1917. Most are now memorials, museums or preserved battlefields.
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.
Egypt, 49 BC. Bayek, the last Medjay protector of the Siwa Oasis, loses his son to a band of masked men, and his hunt for them leads him into the war between Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy XIII, and to the arrival of Julius Caesar. Ubisoft's 2017 game ends with Bayek and his wife Aya founding the secret brotherhood that the whole series grows from.
The studio worked with Egyptologists and historians, enlarged cities for a sense of "pharaonic scale", and later added a combat-free Discovery Tour. This route follows the main story through the real places it uses, from the oracle at Siwa to the spot in Rome where Caesar died. Bayek and the secret orders are fiction; the queen, the generals and the murders mostly are not.
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 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 1977 Robyn Davidson, then in her twenties, walked about 2,700 kilometres from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean with four camels and her dog, crossing some of the emptiest desert on earth. She had spent two years in Alice Springs learning to train wild camels. She had no plan to write about it, but a National Geographic article and photographs by Rick Smolan made her famous, and her 1980 book Tracks became a classic, filmed in 2013.
The route follows her line west across the Northern Territory and Western Australia in order. Much of it crosses Aboriginal land, where she travelled with a Pitjantjatjara elder, Mr Eddie; pins mark communities and stations, not sacred sites.
In October 1934 the Chinese Communists' main army, beaten by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, broke out of its base in Jiangxi and fled west. A year and some 9,000 kilometres later, after river crossings under fire, snow passes and a high-altitude swamp, a few thousand survivors reached northern Shaanxi. On the way, Mao Zedong rose to lead the party, and the retreat became its founding legend.
The route follows the Central Red Army, the best-known of several Long March columns, in date order. Official histories have polished some episodes, and historians still argue about how much fighting there was at Luding Bridge; the texts note where accounts disagree. Most stops now have memorials and museums.
On 12 March 1930 Mahatma Gandhi, aged 60, walked out of his ashram in Ahmedabad with 78 followers, heading for the sea. His target was the British monopoly on salt, a tax that touched every Indian household. Twenty-four days and about 385 kilometres later, on a beach at Dandi, he picked up a lump of salty mud and broke the law — and millions followed.
The route follows the march south through Gujarat in its real order, with the dates from the day-by-day itinerary: the ashram, the first night's halt, the Kheda country, Borsad, Surat and Dandi, where a memorial now stands. The final stop covers what came next: Gandhi's arrest and the beatings at the Dharasana salt works that shocked the world.
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.
In 1970s Kabul, Amir, the son of a rich merchant, and Hassan, the son of his father's Hazara servant, grow up as near-brothers and fly fighting kites together. In the winter of 1975 Amir wins the city's kite tournament — and fails Hassan at the moment Hassan needs him most. War sends Amir into exile in California; a phone call from Peshawar a quarter of a century later sends him back into Taliban Kabul to make amends.
Khaled Hosseini's 2003 debut follows real places in Afghanistan, Pakistan and California. Homes and alleys in the story are not identified, so those pins mark neighbourhoods; the route offers no travel advice for Afghanistan or Peshawar.
Jake Barnes, an American newspaperman wounded in the war, spends his Paris nights in the cafés of Montparnasse with Lady Brett Ashley — the woman he loves and cannot have. Then the whole crowd heads south: trout fishing in the Pyrenees, then a week of San Fermín in Pamplona, where drink, jealousy and a nineteen-year-old matador break everything open.
Hemingway built the novel from his own trips of 1924 and 1925, and almost every stop can still be visited: the café on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, the inn at Burguete, the arcade café on Pamplona's main square, the bullring, the beach at San Sebastián and the Madrid restaurant where the book's last meal is eaten.
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.
