The 1999 Kargil War was fought on the ridges above the Srinagar–Leh highway, around Kargil, Dras, Tololing and Tiger Hill in Ladakh, after Pakistani forces occupied heights on the Indian side of the Line of Control. India calls its campaign Operation Vijay.
The route goes from the highway at Kargil to the battles for Tololing, Tiger Hill and Point 4875, and ends at the Dras war memorial. Both Indian and Pakistani accounts are noted, and many of the heights remain military ground.
Morioh in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable is based on Sendai, Japan, the hometown of the creator Hirohiko Araki. Its place names come from real streets such as Kōtōdai and Jōzenji, and its coast from the area around Matsushima.
The route walks from Araki's birthplace through the park and tree-lined avenue that lend the town its names, to the Mediatheque that hosted the JoJo exhibitions, the Lawson that became OWSON, and the suburbs and coast that supplied Morioh's look. Morioh itself is fictional, so most stops are real names and real models, not scene locations.
The 2003 road movie Bumer opens in Moscow, in Pechatnikov Lane and on the Savvinskaya and Berezhkovskaya embankments, and runs out of town to Raduzhny and Kolomna, where its provincial scenes were shot.
Four car thieves flee Moscow in a stolen BMW and the film follows them from the capital's embankments down to a small town. The pins are approximate: they follow reported filming spots, not exact frames.
Brigada is a crime series about four Moscow friends, Sasha Bely, Kosmos, Pchyola and Fil, who swear loyalty to each other on Sparrow Hills at dawn in 1989. Its plot visits the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment skyscraper and the Uzbekistan restaurant on Neglinnaya Street, and the series was written at Mosfilm and partly filmed in Taldom.
The route walks through the places the plot names in Moscow, then the studio where the script was written and the town where a station scene set in Chechnya was shot.
The Driver series began in 1999 as a car-chase game and grew into a tour of real cities: Miami, Los Angeles and New York in the first game, Havana, Las Vegas and Rio de Janeiro in Driver 2, Nice and Istanbul in Driver 3, and a fictionalised San Francisco in the 2011 sequel. Tanner's undercover work runs from a Miami parking garage to a presidential car, a Rio climax beneath Christ the Redeemer and the Golden Gate Bridge.
This route follows the series city by city, from Ocean Drive's Art Deco hotels to the Las Vegas Strip and the Bosphorus. Some stops are city-level pins because the games recreate whole urban areas rather than single buildings; only Christ the Redeemer and the Golden Gate Bridge are pinned exactly.
Harriet Tubman escaped slavery in 1849 and then went back to Maryland about 13 times, bringing out some 70 people. Her work depended on a chain of Quakers, free Black ministers and abolitionists who hid and moved people north.
The route follows that chain from the Eastern Shore through Wilmington and Philadelphia to Niagara and Salem Chapel in St. Catharines, then to her farm at Auburn. Real routes were kept secret, so most pins are approximate.
The Butterfly Lovers runs from Zhu Yingtai's home in Shangyu and the school in Hangzhou to Liang Shanbo's temple and tomb in Ningbo. The girl who studied disguised as a boy is betrothed to another man; when Liang dies, the earth opens at his grave and the two fly away as butterflies.
The route follows the tale from the heroine's home in Shangyu, to the school in Hangzhou, to the Ningbo temple and tomb, then to a rival claim in Yixing and a statue in Verona. Every Chinese site is local tradition rather than proven history.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon moves from the Karamay Ghost City in Xinjiang to Hongcun and Nanping in Anhui and the Anji bamboo forest, with Mount Cangyan playing Wudang. Ang Lee's wuxia romance follows a retired swordsman, a runaway governor's daughter and a stolen sword.
This route follows the story through the real locations behind it: a desert ghost city, two Anhui villages, the Anji bamboo forest, and Cangyan Mountain, which plays the fictional Wudang. The real Mount Wudang sits in the story, but the film was not shot there.
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.
Raskolnikov's St Petersburg on a map: his garret, the pawnbroker's house, Sennaya Square, the canal and the bridges of the Neva. On an exceptionally hot July evening he counts exactly 730 steps to her door, and Dostoevsky hid many addresses behind initials such as "S. Place" and "K. bridge".
This route follows Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov from the garret to the police office. The garret, the pawnbroker's house and the police office are researchers' identifications rather than facts, and are marked as such.
Where Gladiator was filmed: the Germania battle in a Surrey wood near Farnham, Maximus' farm in Tuscany's Val d'Orcia, the slave market at Ait Ben Haddou in Morocco and Rome's Colosseum rebuilt on Malta's Fort Ricasoli. In 180 AD the general Maximus refuses his loyalty to the new emperor Commodus, loses everything and fights his way back as a gladiator.
The route follows the shoot between January and May 1999: the Surrey wood where the Germania battle burned, the Val d'Orcia valley of Maximus' farm, the Moroccan ksar that played Zuccabar and the one-third Colosseum replica built on Malta's Fort Ricasoli — ending at the real Colosseum, where the story's final duel is set.
In March 1976 a film crew came to southern Tunisia and turned it into another planet. George Lucas had selected Tunisia to provide the desert planet setting for Star Wars, and filming in Tunisia began on March 22, 1976: a troglodyte hotel became the Lars homestead, the salt flats became a moisture farm, and the streets of Ajim on Djerba became the Mos Eisley spaceport.
When the prequels called, the crews came back: locations at Onk Jemal in Tozeur, Ksar Ouled Soltane and Ksar Hadada were used for Tatooine scenes in the 1998 shoot, from the Boonta Eve podrace track to the slave quarters where the boy Anakin lived. Abandoned sets for the filming have been left in the desert but can be visited — this route links all eight sites, from the droids' landing dunes to the granary-courtyard slave quarters.
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.
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.
