Catalog
87 routes found
Port Royal and Tortuga were built on a quiet St Vincent bay, Cannibal Island is Dominican rainforest, and a private Bahamian cay sits behind a famous duel. This route follows the shoots from St Vincent in 2002 through Dominica in 2005 to Grand Bahama, where the ships were filmed in a hurricane season. Most pins mark areas, not exact sets; the sets themselves were built and taken down.
In 1893 Fridtjof Nansen froze a purpose-built ship into the Arctic ice on purpose. His bet was that the pack would carry it across the top of the world, and the sceptics called it self-destruction. This route follows the voyage from Vardø to the pack ice, the drift, the sledge dash to 86°14′N, a hard winter in a stone hut and a lucky meeting at Cape Flora, ending at the museum where the ship rests. Ocean and ice stops have no map pin.
In 1327 a Franciscan detective and his young novice arrive at a Benedictine abbey in northern Italy, and monks begin to die. Umberto Eco's abbey is invented, but it was assembled from real places, and Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1986 film built another one from sets and a German monastery. This route follows the borrowed pieces of the book, from the Sacra di San Michele to the portal at Moissac, then the places that played the abbey on screen. Pins for the book's models are traditional identifications, not locations named in the novel.
Cut off from the rest of the country, Leningrad lived through the winter of 1941–42 on 125 grams of bread a day, half of it sawdust. This route follows the siege through the places that carried the city through: a fortress island, an ice road, a seed bank, a diary, a symphony. It runs from the first day of the encirclement to the memorials that came after, and keeps to documented facts. Several stops are memorials: please visit with respect.
Two Dickens novels, one city of thieves' dens, prisons and cramped lodgings. Oliver Twist is dragged into Fagin's gang in the lanes of Holborn, while Pip of Great Expectations arrives from the Kent marshes expecting a soft white city and finds filth. The route follows Oliver and Nancy from Saffron Hill to London Bridge, Jacob's Island and Newgate, then Pip from Cooling churchyard through Rochester to Little Britain and Barnard's Inn. Several places are traditional models rather than named settings, and each pin says so.
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.
In autumn 1988 the BBC sent Michael Palin round the globe in the footsteps of Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg, with no aircraft allowed. It began and ended at the Reform Club in London and ran from 25 September to 12 December. The route follows nine moments from his own day-by-day captions and diary excerpts: Venice, the Pyramids, a dhow from Dubai to Bombay, Hong Kong, a train to Shanghai, the Pacific, an Aspen balloon and a locked door in Pall Mall. Pins mark cities and landmarks; the real line of travel ran between them.
A failed Spanish expedition to Florida left four survivors, and one of them, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, walked and traded his way across the continent over roughly eight years before meeting Spaniards again in Mexico. He wrote his account from memory. The route runs from Spain through Cuba, Florida and the Texas coast to Culiacán and Mexico City. Most stops are approximate, and the middle of the journey is not traced because historians cannot fix his route.
In August 1803 two small Russian sloops sailed from Kronstadt on the first Russian voyage round the world. Adam Johann von Krusenstern led the expedition on the Nadezhda, and Yuri Lisyansky captained the Neva; the Neva was back almost three years later. This route follows seven turning points, from the Marquesas and Kamchatka to the Tlingit fort at Sitka, the closed door of Nagasaki and the tea trade at Canton. The two ships often sailed apart, so the stops are markers, not one line. Day dates follow the main source, which gives the outward voyage in the modern (New Style) calendar; Russian logs of the time used the Old Style, so the homecoming in 1806 is given by season only. Pins mark towns and bays, not exact anchorages.
Patrick Süskind's Perfume follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born in Paris in 1738, with a gift for scent and no scent of his own. His path runs from the Innocents cemetery to a mountain cave, and then to Grasse, where his craft turns murderous. The route follows the book from Paris to the Plomb du Cantal, Montpellier and Grasse, and ends in Barcelona, where Tom Tykwer's film rebuilt Paris. Only a few places are named exactly; the rest are approximate.
In July 1497 four ships left Lisbon to find a sea route to India. Vasco da Gama's fleet crossed the open South Atlantic, rounded the Cape, worked its way up the African coast, and reached Calicut on 20 May 1498. The voyage ended with two ships and over half the men lost. The route follows the voyage from the Restelo shore in Lisbon to Calicut, then home via Anjediva and the Azores. Landing sites are mostly debated or only broadly known, so most pins are approximate. Dates are as the sources give them, in the Julian calendar then in use.
Haruhi Suzumiya follows a bored narrator, Kyon, and an eccentric classmate who founds a club to search for aliens, time travellers and espers. The story never names its city outright, but its setting is Nishinomiya in Hyogo, where author Nagaru Tanigawa lived from the age of three. The route visits the real places that served as models: the school, two stations, a riverside park, a mountain and Koshien Stadium. Story place names are altered, so most pins mark a model, not a set.
Attack on Titan is set behind three great walls, but its author comes from a real mountain town in Ōita, Japan. Hajime Isayama grew up in Ōyama, now part of Hita, and used the landscape around it as the model for his world. The route follows the town from his birthplace to the 2014 event that made him Tourism Ambassador, and then to the statues of Eren, Mikasa, Armin and Levi that Hita set up in 2020 and 2021. The sources do not tie the series to any single real wall, so the stops mark the town's own tributes.
In September 1786 Goethe slipped away from Carlsbad at 3 in the morning, telling none of his friends, and headed for Italy. He was arrested for drawing a castle, met the ancient world at Verona, and shared a house in Rome with a painter. The route follows his diary from Carlsbad over the Brenner and the Italian lakeshore to Verona, Venice and Rome, then to Vesuvius and Sicily. Some stops are towns or mountains rather than single buildings; the pin accuracy says which.
In 1799 the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and the French botanist Aimé Bonpland sailed for Spain's American realms and spent five years measuring, collecting and climbing across them. They watched electric eels fight wild horses in Venezuela, pushed up Chimborazo, watched a planet cross the Sun from Peru and ended as Jefferson's guest at the White House. This route follows eight stops from the landing at Cumaná to Washington in 1804. Several pins are approximate because the sources name a region or river rather than one spot.
In September 1799 the Russian field marshal Suvorov led his army into Switzerland to join the Allied forces, only to find his allies failing him. He fought through the Alps, crossed high passes and ended in Chur. The route follows the march from Taverne to Chur. Dates are Gregorian (New Style), and pins mark villages or passes rather than battlefields.
Jules Verne sends a Czar's courier 3,400 miles across Russia: from a night fête in Moscow, through the Urals and the Tartar invasion, to besieged Irkutsk. Michael Strogoff carries one letter, a false name and a promise to the Czar. The route follows the book from the Kremlin through Nizhny Novgorod, the Urals, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk and Lake Baikal to Irkutsk. Verne names towns rather than buildings, so every pin is approximate.
In 1751 the Qianlong Emperor left Beijing for the first of six tours south to Jiangnan, the last in 1784. Much of the way ran along the Grand Canal, and the tours took in the dikes of the Huai, the cities of Jiangnan and the holy sites of Shandong. This route follows the first two tours. In 1751: the Hongze Lake embankment, West Lake and Mount Tai. In 1757: Yangzhou, Suzhou and Qufu. Dates follow the Chinese lunar calendar used in the court records.
Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco, but Hong Kong was the city that shaped him: a Nathan Road childhood, Wing Chun lessons with Ip Man, and the film studios that made him a star. This route follows his documented life and the places where his films and legacy meet. It runs from a Kowloon flat and school days, through a surviving Enter the Dragon location and the hospital where he died, to the statue and museum that remember him. Where accounts differ, the stop says so.
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.
Between 1180 and 1185 Japan's two great warrior clans, Taira and Minamoto, fought over the realm, and the war ended with a child emperor, a fleet and the tide at Dan-no-ura. It was the war that led to the first shogun. This route visits seven battlefield sites in date order, from the bridge at Uji to the Kanmon Straits. Documented events are kept apart from the Heike Monogatari's legends, which the text attributes to the tale. Most battle areas are approximate.
Neku Sakuraba wakes in the Shibuya crowd with no memory and is pulled into the Reapers' Game, a week-long contest of missions that decides whether the dead live on or vanish. Square Enix's 2007 Nintendo DS cult classic turned the district into its whole stage, keeping the landmarks and changing the shop names. The route follows Neku from the scramble crossing to Hachikō, the ramen shop on Dōgenzaka, the Cat Street café, the hidden Shibuya River and the walk back through Udagawa. In-game places are mostly stand-ins, so pins are approximate except two icons.
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.
In January 1817 General José de San Martín led an army out of Mendoza and over the Andes to free Chile from Spanish rule. The crossing took 21 days, and the feat has been compared to Hannibal's and Napoleon's crossings of the Alps. The route follows the campaign from the hill monument in Mendoza and the El Plumerillo camp, over the two passes the columns used, to the victories at Chacabuco and Maipú. The mountain stops are pinned approximately; the passes are long, and the army's exact tracks are not.