Catalog
25 routes found
Legend and archaeology meet at six places, from Agamemnon's citadel to Odysseus's island. Each stop is told from Homer's text, with what archaeologists have found kept apart and honestly labelled. The route follows the epic from the fleet at Aulis to the plain of the Scamander, then the Odyssey's road home via Pylos and Ithaca. Many identifications here are traditional or disputed, and the pins show it.
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.
Disguised as a beggar, a Belgian-French explorer walked into the forbidden city of Lhasa among pilgrims. Alexandra David-Néel and her adopted son Yongden stayed two months in 1924, then slipped away before the governor could act. The route follows her from Kumbum, where she studied for years, across the Kyi to the Potala and the Monlam crowds, then on to Samye, Tsetang and Gyantse. Pins are area-level, and critics have disputed her account since 1972.
A seventeen-year-old heir is sold to a brig bound for the colonies, wrecked off Mull, and thrown into the heather beside a fugitive named Alan. Stevenson's chase carries them from the Firth of Forth through Appin and the Highlands to the bridge at Stirling. The route follows David's journey in chapter order, from the Queensferry inn where he is handed over to the old bridge where the pair cross the Forth. Several scenes rest on real events, such as the Appin murder and Cluny MacPherson's hiding place.
A poet who nearly lost his head for his verses, Su Shi (Su Dongpo) was banished to Huangzhou, Huizhou and Hainan, and wrote some of his best work in exile. The route follows his life in order, from his family home in Sichuan through the 1079 trial, three places of banishment, and his death at Changzhou in 1101. Several stops are rebuilt memorials or city-level markers, and each says so.
Macondo is not on any map, but its author grew up on Colombia's Caribbean coast. Gabriel García Márquez was raised in Aracataca by grandparents who treated the extraordinary as perfectly natural, and that deadpan voice became the novel. The route runs from Riohacha, where the Buendías begin, through the marsh and sierra country around Macondo to the railway, the banana company and the massacre, and ends in Mexico City, where the book was written. Macondo itself is fictional, so its stops are real stand-ins.
The greatest of the Icelandic sagas is a story of two friends, one famous for his strength and one for his wisdom, and of how a chain of insults, killings and neat legal settlements drags both families towards a night of fire. It is told almost entirely in real places in south and south-west Iceland. The route runs from the national assembly at Þingvellir, where Gunnar meets his future wife, through Gunnar's farm at Hlíðarendi, an ice-bank leap on the Markarfljót and the Law Rock, to Njáll's farm at Bergþórshvoll. The saga names the farms, but not every exact spot, so some pins mark the area.
At 11:30 a.m. on 29 May 1953 Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stood on the summit of Mount Everest, the first people confirmed to have done so. They were part of a British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt, which in the end amounted to over four hundred men, including twenty Sherpa guides and 362 porters. The route follows that expedition from winter training in Wales through Kathmandu, Thyangboche, Base Camp, the Khumbu Icefall, the Western Cwm and the South Col to the summit, then to the telegraph runner's stop at Namche Bazaar. Pins above Base Camp mark the terrain, not the exact camps of 1953.
In 1271 a seventeen-year-old Venetian set out with his father and uncle for the court of Kublai Khan and did not come home for 24 years. Years later, in a Genoese prison, he dictated what he had seen to a fellow inmate, and The Travels of Marco Polo was the result. The route follows the book from Venice and Acre to the Persian Gulf, across the Pamir highlands and the desert to Kublai's summer and winter capitals, south to Hangzhou and the port of Zayton, and home again. Some of the roads are reconstructed by scholars, and Polo sometimes exaggerates, so each stop notes where the evidence is thin.
On 20 September 1519 five ships and about 270 men sailed from Spain to find a western sea road to the Spice Islands. Magellan died in the Philippines, but Juan Sebastián Elcano brought the Victoria home three years later with eighteen survivors and 26 tons of spices, having sailed all the way around the world. The route follows the voyage from the mouth of the Guadalquivir past Port St. Julian, through the strait and across the Pacific to the Moluccas, then home past the Cape of Good Hope. Anchorages are often unrecorded, so most pins mark the nearest known place; the dates come from Pigafetta's journal and modern accounts.
A peasant girl from a Meuse valley village persuades a doubting captain, then a doubting prince, to give her an army. Within weeks of reaching Orléans in 1429 she has lifted a siege, and by July she stands beside Charles at his coronation. Barely a year later she is a prisoner, and by May 1431 she is dead. The route follows her through nine places, from her family's house in Domrémy to the square in Rouen where she was burned. Where a building was rebuilt or the exact spot is unrecorded, the stop says so.
A cursed squire, a spectral hound and a moor that swallows ponies: Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novel, serialised in The Strand Magazine in 1901–02, is set largely on Dartmoor, and several of its places have real counterparts. The route runs from the grave that may have inspired the legend and the ten-thirty train from Paddington to the convict prison at Princetown, the mire, the tors and the Stapletons' house. Baskerville Hall and Merripit House exist only in the book, so their pins mark a stand-in or nothing at all.
Victor Hugo's 1862 novel follows the convict Jean Valjean from the night a bishop's kindness turns him towards good, through years as a respected factory owner and the rescuer of a child, to the street fighting of June 1832. This route follows that path from a bishop's town in the south to the sewers and bridges of Paris. Hugo hid two of the towns behind initials and the wine-shop barricade has been built over, so only the Luxembourg Garden is pinned exactly; the other stops mark real places standing in for the book's.
J. Robert Oppenheimer studies in Cambridge and Göttingen, builds a physics school at Berkeley, and is handed the one job nobody else wants: build the atomic bomb before the Nazis do. Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer (2023) follows him from the Cavendish Laboratory to a secret mesa in New Mexico, through the Trinity test and the political fallout that ends his career. This route follows the film's real places — Cambridge, Göttingen, LeConte Hall, Los Alamos, Trinity, the White House, the Institute for Advanced Study and the room where his security clearance was revoked. The film's own stand-ins, from Ghost Ranch to Kerckhoff Hall, Belen and Alhambra, are noted at each stop.
A feather drifts down onto a bench in Savannah, and a man starts to talk. His life unrolls across half a century of American history, from an Alabama childhood to the jungles of Vietnam, the Lincoln Memorial, the Watergate and a bayou shrimp boat. This route follows the film in order, from the bench on Chippewa Square to the lighthouse in Maine and the desert where the running finally stops. It marks the real locations and the real stand-ins, since the fictional town of Greenbow and the Vietnam jungle were both played by South Carolina.
Kalos is Metropolitan France turned into a star-shaped Pokémon region. Lumiose City is inspired by Paris, its Prism Tower by the Eiffel Tower and its art museum by the Louvre; the Battle Château recalls Chenonceau on the Loire, the palais Chaydeuvre is the château de Versailles, and the stones outside Geosenge Town are the Carnac stones. The games never confirm their models — these are fan and encyclopaedia identifications — so every pin on this route is speculative. The route follows the story across the real France behind Kalos: the town where the adventure begins, Lumiose's iron tower, two châteaux and a royal palace, a coastal aquarium, the island tower where Mega Evolution is learned, the cathedral clock behind Anistar's sundial, the Breton megalith field where Team Flare hides its ultimate weapon, and an abandoned mine where the legendary Zygarde sleeps.
In 1715 a Welsh pirate kills an Assassin, steals his clothes and his name, and ends up sitting in his place at a meeting of Templars in Havana. That is how Edward Kenway enters the Golden Age of Piracy: he takes a ship, the Jackdaw, builds a pirate brotherhood in Nassau, loses his friends to the gallows and to each other, and spends the rest of the story chasing a device called the Observatory that can watch anyone on earth. Black Flag sets all of it in real ports — Havana, Nassau, Kingston, Port Royal — and then leaves the Caribbean for the Maya ruins of Tulum, an island in the Gulf of Guinea and a final scene in London. The route follows Edward from the harbour where Torres's plot starts, through the pirate republic and the governor who ends it, to the Kingston house where Mary Read drops the disguise, the jail at Port Royal, Príncipe, where the Sage is waiting, and Covent Garden. Most stops mark a real landmark in the town the game rebuilds.
James Joyce's Ulysses is one ordinary day, 16 June 1904, in Dublin, told in eighteen episodes through Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertisement canvasser, and Stephen Dedalus, who starts the day in a tower by the sea. This route walks the day in the order the novel runs it: from the Martello tower at Sandycove where it opens to Howth Head, where Molly Bloom's memory ends it with a yes. Almost every stop is a place you can still stand in: the tower where Joyce stayed in 1904, the strand Stephen walks, the street of the chemist's where Bloom buys soap, the cemetery of the funeral, the pub where he eats his sandwich, the library where he passes between Stephen and Mulligan, the quay of the Ormond Hotel and the maternity hospital. The last stop is a recollection rather than a setting: the novel never says where on Howth Head the two of them lay.
Taki, a Tokyo schoolboy who waits tables in Shinjuku, keeps waking up in the body of Mitsuha, a shrine maiden in a mountain town who has never left it. They leave notes on each other's skin, fall for each other from a distance — and then the switching stops dead. Taki rides west with two friends to find the town he can only draw from memory, and finds it gone: a fragment of a comet took Itomori and five hundred people three years before his visit. The town was invented, but the film stands on real ground: the Shinjuku where Taki lives and works, the Hida valley that lent Itomori its backdrop, the lake generally credited with the crater pool, and the stone staircase where the story ends. One caveat: Itomori was never filmed, so its crater is the one stop here without a pin.
Two branches of one royal family, the five Pandava brothers and their hundred Kaurava cousins, quarrel over the throne of the Kuru kingdom. The Pandavas survive a murder plot, win the princess Draupadi, build a splendid capital, lose everything in a rigged game of dice and spend thirteen years in exile before the families meet in an eighteen-day war at Kurukshetra. The Sanskrit epic, one of the longest poems ever composed, also holds the Bhagavad Gita. Northern India is dotted with places that tradition links to the story, several of them with real Iron Age remains. This route follows the Pandavas through those traditional sites. They are identifications of faith and local memory; archaeology has found ancient towns, but not the epic's events.
In November 1274 a Mongol and Korean fleet landed on Tsushima, a mountainous Japanese island halfway to Korea, and overwhelmed its few defenders. Sucker Punch's 2020 game drops a fictional samurai, Jin Sakai, into that invasion: he survives the massacre on the beach and turns into "the Ghost", a guerrilla who breaks the samurai code to drive the invaders out. The designers visited Tsushima twice but did not copy it one to one. This route visits the real places behind the game's opening battle, its castle and its shrines, most of them featured in the island's own guide for players. Jin, his clan and his battles are fiction; the landing, the fortress and the mountains are not.
In May 1846 Ida Pfeiffer, a 48-year-old Viennese widow with grown-up sons and very little money, set off to go round the world — mostly alone, on cargo ships, on horseback and with caravans. She came home two and a half years later, in the middle of a revolution, and turned her diaries into a bestseller translated into seven languages. The Royal Geographical Society in London would not admit her, because it did not accept women. The route follows her first world journey in order, from her own book, A Woman's Journey Round the World: Hamburg, the Brazilian forest, Cape Horn and Valparaíso, Tahiti, Canton, Baghdad, Persia and home. There are no visitor tips for Iraq or Iran.
In spring 1689 the poet Matsuo Bashō gave up his hut in Edo and set off on foot with his friend and disciple Kawai Sora into Oku, the remote north of Japan. For about 156 days and some 2,400 kilometres they walked to the places the old poets had made famous — a barrier gate, a bay of pine islands, a battlefield, a mountain temple — and Bashō answered them with haiku. The travel diary he made of it, Oku no Hosomichi, published in 1702, is one of the classics of Japanese literature, and its stops are still pilgrimage sites. Bashō polished the facts for art; Sora's own diary shows where. Dates follow the old lunar calendar, so they are given here by season.
In 1791 Saint-Domingue was France's richest colony, a sugar and coffee economy worked by hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans under brutal conditions. Thirteen years later it was Haiti, the first nation born from a successful slave revolt and the first independent Black-led state in the Americas. The cost was enormous: some 200,000 Black Haitians died, and tens of thousands of French and British soldiers, most of them from yellow fever. The route follows the turning points, from the ceremony that tradition places at Bois Caïman to the declaration at Gonaïves, with a detour to the French mountain fortress where Toussaint Louverture died. Fighting was savage on all sides, and the texts say so plainly. The route offers no travel advice for Haiti.