In 1989 communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe came apart in a few months — through round-table talks in Poland, a picnic on the Hungarian border, candlelit marches in Leipzig, a muddled press conference in Berlin, students in Prague and a bloody uprising in Romania. Each country had its own causes, but every crack made the next one easier.
The route visits the exact places where it happened, most of them marked today by a memorial, a museum or a plaque: the shipyard gate where Solidarity was born, the palace of the Round Table, the old border road near Sopron, the church in Leipzig, the bridge at Bornholmer Straße, a street corner in Prague, a pastor's flat in Timișoara and the balcony in Bucharest.
The boy born on the Onon River became the ruler of the largest land empire in history. This route follows him from the steppe camps of Khentii, through the war that began at a border town in Kazakhstan, to the siege of Samarkand and a death in the middle of a campaign.
The sources disagree on his birth year, his birthplace and his grave. Where the Secret History of the Mongols gives a legend and other sources give the record, the stops say which is which.
In March 1917 Nicholas II came home from abdication to the palace where his family had lived as emperor and empress. Sixteen months later none of them was alive. In between lay exile: first under the Provisional Government, then under the Bolsheviks, ever farther east.
The route follows that road from the Alexander Palace through the governor's house in Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg and the forest sites nearby, where the story ended and where it was later argued over. It is told plainly, and the final stops are places of mourning for many visitors.
Water Margin follows 108 spirits released from a sealed hall who return as outlaws, with Song Jiang as their chief. Its episodes range from Daoism's mountain in Jiangxi to the Shandong marsh, a tiger-haunted ridge, a Yangtze tavern and the Hangzhou tide.
Each stop is a scene from the novel, set beside what is documented: a real Song Jiang appears in the Song History, and the real Liangshan Marsh silted up centuries ago. Places tied to the story only by later tradition are marked.
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games send scavengers called stalkers through the Zone, a radioactive wasteland built from the real Chernobyl exclusion zone. The developers copied bridges, railways and buildings from photographs and visits, then bent the geography for gameplay.
This route goes from the edge of the Zone to the reactor, setting each game location beside its real counterpart. The real zone is restricted and trespassers are prosecuted, so this is a map to read, not a trip to plan.
At 11:30 a.m. on 29 May 1953 Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stood on the summit of Mount Everest, the first people confirmed to have done so. They were part of a British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt, which in the end amounted to over four hundred men, including twenty Sherpa guides and 362 porters.
The route follows that expedition from winter training in Wales through Kathmandu, Thyangboche, Base Camp, the Khumbu Icefall, the Western Cwm and the South Col to the summit, then to the telegraph runner's stop at Namche Bazaar. Pins above Base Camp mark the terrain, not the exact camps of 1953.
Bond's final outing opens beside a lake in Norway and closes on an island in the Faroe Islands, with a long detour through southern Italy and a retirement in Jamaica in between. The story's geography is real: Matera's cave lanes, a bridge over the Gravina gorge, a railway station at Sapri, a waterfront house at Port Antonio, the Atlantic Ocean Road and the cliffs of Kalsoy.
The route follows the film's order — the frozen-lake flashback, the grave and the bridge, the Matera car chase, the farewell at Sapri, five quiet years in Jamaica and the 'Cuban' harbour that is really Port Antonio, then the Norway drive and the villain's island in the Faroe Islands. The beach house in Jamaica and the lake house in Norway were sets, both since dismantled.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) sends Indy from a Boy Scout outing in the Utah desert to the rock-cut façade of Petra, chasing the Holy Grail and his missing father. Three trials guard the cup at the end. The film borrows its scenery from half of Europe, the Middle East and the American West.
Nine stops, most of them still standing: the Arches canyons of the opening, the church façade in Venice's Campo San Barnaba that plays the library, an Eifel castle dressed as Brunwald, a San Francisco building that played Berlin's Tempelhof airport, the Almería beach where Henry brings down a fighter with an umbrella, a Granada station playing Alexandretta, the Tabernas tank chase, the Treasury that fronts the Grail's temple, and the Texas sunset the film ends on. Dates are story time; filming ran from May 1988 to early 1989.
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.
