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.
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 May 1863 a Hamburg professor of mineralogy decodes a 300-year-old note in runes: go down the crater of Snæfell in Iceland and you will reach the centre of the Earth. Within days he drags his reluctant nephew Axel north by train, steamer and schooner, hires a silent Icelandic guide named Hans and climbs into the volcano.
Verne sets up the impossible with a timetable you could almost follow today — Altona station, Kiel, Copenhagen, Reykjavík, the hamlet of Stapi below the glacier. What happens underground is pure fiction, but the way out is real: three months later the travellers are spat out of Stromboli, an island volcano off Sicily, more than 3,000 km from where they went in.
On the evening of 2 October 1872, the punctual and unflappable Phileas Fogg bets his fellow members of the Reform Club £20,000 — half his fortune — that he can go around the world in eighty days, and leaves that same night with his new French valet, Passepartout. On his heels comes Detective Fix, convinced that Fogg is a bank robber on the run. Jules Verne's novel appeared in 1872, when the opening of the Suez Canal and new railways across India and America had made such a race against the timetable just about possible.
The route follows the journey eastward in the novel's own dates, from Pall Mall back to Pall Mall.
In 1888 Nellie Bly, the star reporter of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, proposed turning Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days into fact. On 14 November 1889, with two days' notice and as little luggage as she could manage, she sailed from Hoboken to beat Phileas Fogg's fictional record. She came home 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes later, a world record — briefly — and a celebrity, while the World's readers guessed her arrival time to the second.
The route follows her book of 1890, stop by stop, with the dates from her own record. She went east by steamer and train, through the Suez Canal and the British ports of Asia.
