Catalog
7 routes found
Yurucamp (ゆるキャン△) sends a handful of schoolgirls camping around Mount Fuji, and most of what they visit is real. This route follows eight places from the series, from Lake Motosu to the Mizugaki area. Campsite and shop names are often changed on screen, so each stop names the real place it is modelled on.
In 1857 two British officers set out from Zanzibar to find the Great Lakes rumoured to lie in the centre of the continent and, they hoped, the source of the Nile. They found two lakes, and then fell out over what they had found. The route runs from a failed Somali expedition through Zanzibar, Kazeh and Ujiji to Lake Victoria, then on to Speke's Ripon Falls and the Bath debate that never happened. All pins are approximate, as the sources name regions and towns rather than exact spots.
On 6 January 1482, a poet, a gypsy dancer, a deaf bellringer and a tormented priest cross paths in the Paris of Victor Hugo's imagination. It is a city of crowds, bonfires, gibbets and a cathedral that is almost a character in its own right. This route follows the story from the Palais de Justice to the square where punishments were held, the beggars' court, the Seine bridge, Notre-Dame itself and the hilltop gibbet. Much of medieval Paris is gone, so most pins mark an area rather than a surviving building.
On 10 November 1871, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, the journalist Henry M. Stanley took off his hat in front of a crowd and said, as he tells it in his own book, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" The explorer many thought dead had been found, after nearly eight months on the road from the coast. The route follows Stanley's account, How I Found Livingstone, over eight stops: from Zanzibar and Bagamoyo through Mpwapwa, Tabora and the Malagarasi to Ujiji, then up the lake to Mugere and back to the parting at Tabora. Stanley's camps are rarely identifiable today, so every pin is approximate.
One night at Cruachan, Queen Medb of Connacht and her husband Ailill compare their riches and find them equal in all but one thing: Ailill owns a magnificent white-horned bull. Medb sets out to take an even finer one, the Brown Bull of Cooley, from Ulster, whose warriors are all laid low by an ancient curse. Only the seventeen-year-old Cú Chulainn stands in her way, holding off her army ford by ford, one champion a day. The Táin Bó Cúailnge, "the Cattle Raid of Cooley", is the centrepiece of Ireland's Ulster Cycle, preserved in manuscripts from the 12th century on. Its storytellers loved explaining place-names, and many of its places are real and visitable. This route follows the raid from Connacht to Cooley and the bull's last journey home. Quotations are from Joseph Dunn's 1914 translation.
Ernest Shackleton set out in 1914 to cross Antarctica on foot. He never even landed. His ship, Endurance, was trapped in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, drifted for ten months and was crushed and sunk, leaving 28 men on the ice with three lifeboats. What followed — months on drifting floes, a landing on Elephant Island, an 800-mile voyage in an open boat and a march across the mountains of South Georgia — ended with every one of them coming home alive. The route follows that escape from South Georgia to the wreck and back, with dates from Shackleton's own account, South. Most of these places can only be reached by expedition ship.
In the spring of 334 BC Alexander, the 22-year-old king of Macedon, crossed into Asia with an army of Macedonians and Greeks to make war on the Persian Empire. Eleven years later he had defeated the Persian king Darius III three times, taken Egypt, burned Persepolis and led his men to the rivers of the Punjab — and then died in Babylon at the age of 32, his empire stretching from Greece to India. The route follows the campaign through its turning points, with Arrian's Anabasis, written four centuries later from earlier accounts, as the main guide. Several battlefields can only be placed approximately; their pins are marked as such.