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.
Grigory Melekhov loves another man's wife, goes to war, and changes sides in the Civil War four times. Sholokhov's novel of the Don Cossacks grew out of the Upper Don, and its landscape is still there.
The route moves from the invented hamlet of Tatarsky to Vyoshenskaya, the stanitsa of the 1919 uprising, then to the villages where Sholokhov lived and wrote. Tatarsky and the monument are marked approximately.
Two love stories shot in guerrilla style across Hong Kong in 1994: a policeman who buys cans of pineapple while he waits for a month to end, and a girl at a fast-food counter who sneaks into a policeman's flat.
The route follows the plot from a Tsim Sha Tsui nightclub to a block of guesthouses, then across the harbour to Lan Kwai Fong and the Mid-Levels escalator, and ends at Kai Tak, the old airport in Fallen Angels. Chungking Express stops are filming sites; the Midnight Express pin is approximate.
Two Makoto Shinkai films, two love stories that never quite meet: a rainy-morning friendship in a Tokyo garden, and a boy and girl pulled apart across Japan, from a snowbound station in Tochigi to a rocket island in the south.
The route starts with The Garden of Words in Shinjuku Gyoen, then follows 5 Centimeters per Second through its three episodes: Tokyo and Iwafune, Tanegashima, and Tokyo again. Each stop names its film.
Pedro Almodóvar has shot the majority of his films in Madrid, and Madrid's tourism office lists the exact streets, bars and squares where his scenes happened.
The route follows eight filming spots in order of release, from the El Rastro bar of Labyrinth of Passion in 1982 to the Comendadoras square of Parallel Mothers in 2021, with one detour to Almagro in La Mancha for Volver.
Contains difficult themes: the murder of a poet in the Spanish Civil War.
Federico García Lorca was born in a farming village in the Granada vega and wrote his rural plays in the family's summer house on the city's edge. In August 1936, weeks into the Civil War, he was arrested in Granada and killed near Víznar.
The route follows his life from the birthplace to the orchard house, then the last days in 1936 and the memorials in the hills. The exact place of his death and grave is still disputed, and the final stops are marked as approximate or speculative.
Tokyo-3 is the fortress city of Neon Genesis Evangelion, home of NERV and the battleground against its monstrous enemies. It is fictional, but the series places it on the north shore of Lake Ashi near Sengokuhara, in Hakone, and the town has leaned into the connection ever since.
The route follows five real places where the series' scenes and stand-ins meet Hakone, from the Sengokuhara plain to the lake where Tokyo-3 drowns. The city never existed, so each pin marks a real stand-in.
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.
A retired detective with a fear of heights is hired to follow a friend's wife around San Francisco, because her husband fears she is possessed by Carlotta Valdes, a woman who died in 1857. Hitchcock's 1958 thriller was shot on location in San Francisco, at Mission San Juan Bautista, in Big Basin Redwoods State Park, at Cypress Point on 17-Mile Drive and at Paramount Studios in Hollywood.
This route follows the story in film order through nine places: a vanished restaurant, a Nob Hill apartment block, a mission cemetery and an art museum, a fort under the Golden Gate Bridge, a coastal kiss, a mission bell tower and a hotel with a green neon sign.
Netherfield Park is let at last, and Austen's novel follows Elizabeth Bennet from her family's village to a Kent parsonage and on to Derbyshire. The houses of the book are described rather than mapped, so this route follows the real places where the 2005 film and the 1995 BBC series found them.
Nine stops follow the story in order, from Longbourn to the inn at Lambton. Each pin is a real filming site standing in for a place in the book; only Gracechurch Street is the real London street the novel itself names.
On 16 June 1994 an American, Jesse, and a French student, Céline, meet on a train from Budapest. He talks her into getting off with him in Vienna, and with no money for a hotel they walk the city all night, talking about love, death and everything else until his flight leaves in the morning. Richard Linklater's 1995 film was shot entirely in Vienna and began a trilogy that continued in Before Sunset and Before Midnight.
The film strings its locations together as if they were a single walk; in reality they are scattered across the city, from the outer districts to the Danube. This route visits them in the order of the night.
