Quigley Down Under is set in Fremantle, Western Australia, but it was filmed in the Northern Territory and Victoria: Alice Springs, Apollo Bay and Warrnambool.
This route follows the sharpshooter from the dock to the Outback ranch, the desert and the coastal town to the final wharf. Warrnambool played Fremantle, so the Western Australia stop marks only the real port the story names.
In December 2021 private detective Takayuki Yagami comes to Isezaki Ijincho, a recreation of Yokohama's Isezakichō, to investigate bullying at Seiryo High School. The case grows into a murder inquiry that pulls him through the shopping street, Chinatown and the waterfront.
The route follows the game's Yokohama from Kannai Station, where Yagami and Masaharu Kaito arrive, along Isezaki Road, through the Chinatown meeting that starts the case, to Hamakita Park (the real Yamashita Park) and the Basha-kaidō drone races. The model blends Sakuragichō and Hinodechō with Isezakichō, so the map is no scale copy.
Sadko is a poor gusli player from Novgorod whose music wins the favour of the Sea Tsar, a golden fish and a fortune, until the sea demands payment. The story is best known abroad through Rimsky-Korsakov's opera.
The route follows the tale through the real geography it grew from: the merchants' market, Lake Ilmen, the Volkhov trade route, the river's source, and the Novgorod church of the man Sadko may be based on. None of the places is named exactly in the tale, so all pins are approximate.
Between 1405 and 1433 the Ming court sent a fleet from Nanjing across the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, seven times, under the admiral Zheng He. It came home with ambassadors and exotic animals.
This route follows the sequence from the shipyard in Nanjing through Java, Malacca, Ceylon, Calicut and Hormuz to Malindi in East Africa, and ends at his empty tomb. Most ports are approximate pins, and later temple traditions are marked as such.
Vice City is Miami with the labels peeled off. The 2002 game, set in 1986, follows gangster Tommy Vercetti's rise to power after prison, from an ambushed drug deal to the takeover of a drug lord's mansion. The developers built the world from extensive field research in Miami, and the plot draws on the city's real Cubans, Haitians and biker gangs.
This route pins six real places behind the fiction: the port of the opening ambush, the Ocean Drive strip behind Ocean Beach, Little Havana and Little Haiti with their warring gangs, Downtown's biker ground, and the private island behind the Starfish Island mansion. Every pin marks the real stand-in, and each stop names the game location it doubles for. One caveat: Vice City itself is fictional, so expect the flavour of 1980s Miami rather than a street-by-street copy.
In 1977 Robyn Davidson, then in her twenties, walked about 2,700 kilometres from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean with four camels and her dog, crossing some of the emptiest desert on earth. She had spent two years in Alice Springs learning to train wild camels. She had no plan to write about it, but a National Geographic article and photographs by Rick Smolan made her famous, and her 1980 book Tracks became a classic, filmed in 2013.
The route follows her line west across the Northern Territory and Western Australia in order. Much of it crosses Aboriginal land, where she travelled with a Pitjantjatjara elder, Mr Eddie; pins mark communities and stations, not sacred sites.
