Jin Yong, the grand master of martial arts fiction, was born in Haining, Zhejiang. This route follows him out of the family house, to the tide he loved, and then across China to the places his heroes fight: a lake in Jiaxing, an island off Zhoushan, the mountains and monastery of Hua, Shaolin and Wudang, and a cell under Hangzhou's West Lake.
The real landmarks are documented; the sects, manors and duels set at them are fiction. Each stop says which is which, and where a pin marks the real place, it is not a scene.
Two of Mexico's best-known painters married in 1929 and spent decades making art in one city: she in the family house where she was born, he on the walls of its palaces.
The route runs from Frida's Blue House through Rivera's murals, the twin studio houses in San Ángel and the Trotsky house nearby, to the museum pyramid Diego built for his collection.
Two friends set out for a weekend at a fishing cabin, and one violent night at a roadhouse bar turns the trip into a run for Mexico across the American West. Ridley Scott's 1991 film is set on a route from Arkansas to the Grand Canyon, but it was filmed almost entirely in California and Utah, around Bakersfield and Moab, between June and August 1990.
This route follows the story in film order through six real places: a Long Beach bar, a Los Angeles motel, a Colorado general store, the desert at Arches, the ghost town of Cisco and the cliff edge at Dead Horse Point. Almost all of them stand in for somewhere else, and each stop says where.
L.A. Noire rebuilds Los Angeles in 1947 with fanatical care: the studio mapped the real streets, modelled building interiors on the originals, and filled the map with the city's landmarks. Detective Cole Phelps drives that recreation through traffic, homicide, vice and arson cases, and much of the city he moves through is still standing.
This tour follows the real places behind the game's map, from Union Station and Bunker Hill to Wilshire's art deco and the Hollywood movie palaces, then down to the river where the story ends. Every pin marks a real site the game put on its streets.
Puyi became emperor of China at the age of two, lost the throne at six, and spent the rest of his life being used by others: as a puppet emperor for Japan in Manchuria, then as a war criminal re-educated in a Communist prison, and finally as an ordinary citizen working in a Beijing garden. Bernardo Bertolucci's 1987 epic, which won all nine Oscars it was nominated for, was the first Western feature film allowed to shoot inside the Forbidden City.
The route visits the real places of Puyi's life, most of them museums today. The film compresses and softens his story, and some of its scenes were shot in Italy.
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.
