The discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 began at Highclere Castle in Hampshire, the home of Lord Carnarvon, who paid for Howard Carter's search in the Valley of the Kings. This route follows the money and the dig, from Hampshire to Luxor and Cairo.
It runs from the 1907 digs at Deir el-Bahari to the first step of KV62, Carnarvon's death in Cairo, his burial on Beacon Hill and the museum where the treasures ended up. One caveat: the exact site of the Cairo hotel is not pinned.
Russia's national poet, Alexander Pushkin, went from the Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo to exile at Mikhailovskoye, a Moscow wedding, the duel at the Black River in Saint Petersburg and a grave at Svyatogorsky Monastery. The route follows his life, not his fiction.
It runs from the schoolboy of 1811 to the funeral of 1837, and ends at the monastery near Pskov where he was buried beside his mother. Where the exact spot of a stop is only approximate, the stop says so.
Tom Clancy's The Division 2 is set in a ruined Washington, D.C., from the White House and the Capitol to Roosevelt Island, Union Station and the Tidal Basin.
Seven months after the Green Poison outbreak, five factions carve up the capital and the Agent works to restore order. This route follows the game's key places, with a note on what each real landmark is today. The developers described the map as a one-to-one recreation of the city.
The Karate Kid was filmed across Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley: Daniel's South Seas apartments in Reseda, the street in Canoga Park where Miyagi's house stood, the beach at Leo Carrillo and the final tournament at the Matadome in Northridge.
The route follows Daniel's arrival in California, from the Reseda apartment where he and his mother arrive, past West Valley High and the Cobra Kai dojo, to Ali's house in Encino, the go-karts at Golf N' Stuff and the lake in the Chatsworth preserve where Miyagi teaches balance. Most of the places still stand, though Miyagi's house was demolished.
Wim Wenders' Perfect Days follows Hirayama, a Tokyo toilet cleaner who keeps his days exactly the same: the same overalls, the same cassette tapes, the same sandwich under the trees. The city changes around him; he notices the light through the leaves.
This route follows the film's real Tokyo, from the old apartment east of the Sumida to four of the Tokyo Toilet project's designer facilities, the shrine bench where he eats lunch, the sento and Asakusa bar that fill his evenings, and the bridge where the story ends.
Pushkin's novel in verse follows a bored St. Petersburg dandy who inherits a country estate, rejects a girl's love letter, kills his friend in a duel, and years later finds her transformed into the star of Petersburg society.
The route runs from the capital's garden walks to the road into Moscow and the exile estate where he wrote part of the book. Most places in the verse are glimpsed rather than described, so several pins are approximate or stand-ins.
Legend of the White Snake begins on Mount Emei and moves to Hangzhou's West Lake, Jinshan Temple in Zhenjiang and Leifeng Pagoda. Two snake spirits take human form and an abbot tries to separate them.
The route follows the popular opera version from the legend's mountain origin, through Hangzhou's West Lake and the flooded temple at Jinshan, to Broken Bridge and the pagoda where the White Snake ends up imprisoned. The tale exists in many versions; this route follows the standard opera telling.
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.
Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast about his poor, happy early years in 1920s Paris, working from notebooks he had left in trunks at the Ritz in 1928. It was published in 1964, after his death.
This route walks the memoir's Paris: the flat on the rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, Gertrude Stein's salon, Sylvia Beach's bookshop, the cafés of Montparnasse and Saint-Germain, and the Ritz where the notebooks resurfaced. Hemingway himself said the book may be read as imagination, so treat its scenes as a memory, not a record.
Fitzgerald set The Great Gatsby on two invented peninsulas, West Egg and East Egg, but he built them from the Long Island he knew in Great Neck, where he lived from October 1922. Behind the glamour sit a dump, a station and a hotel suite that were all real.
This route follows Nick from the Eggs through the valley of ashes, Penn Station, the Queensboro Bridge and the Plaza Hotel. The Eggs, the valley and Gatsby's house are invented, so their pins mark the real places the novel is read against.
Sunja grows up in her mother's boarding house on Yeongdo, an island in the harbour of Busan, under Japanese rule. Pregnant by a married man, she marries a gentle minister instead and leaves with him for Osaka, where Koreans live poor and despised in a neighbourhood called Ikaino. The Apple TV+ series (2022–2024), based on Min Jin Lee's 2017 novel, follows four generations of her family from 1915 to 1989.
The route follows the family through real places in Korea and Japan, in story order. Homes, shops and offices in the series are fictional, so the pins mark the neighbourhoods and cities where the story is set, not filming locations.
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.
Ernest Shackleton set out in 1914 to cross Antarctica on foot. He never even landed. His ship, Endurance, was trapped in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, drifted for ten months and was crushed and sunk, leaving 28 men on the ice with three lifeboats. What followed — months on drifting floes, a landing on Elephant Island, an 800-mile voyage in an open boat and a march across the mountains of South Georgia — ended with every one of them coming home alive.
The route follows that escape from South Georgia to the wreck and back, with dates from Shackleton's own account, South. Most of these places can only be reached by expedition ship.
