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Real JourneysSpeculative

Chkalov's Transpolar Flight: Moscow to Vancouver

On 18 June 1937 three Soviet airmen took off from Moscow in a single-engine plane and landed in Washington State more than 63 hours later, having flown over the North Pole. It was the first non-stop flight from the Soviet Union to the United States. The route follows the crew from the airfield near Shchyolkovo to the landing at Pearson Field, then to the general's table, the White House and the monument that still stands by the runway. The path over the Arctic is shown only as a symbolic pin.

6 locations1/6 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Nansen and the Fram: Drifting Across the Arctic

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.

8 locations2/8 visitable

HistoryApproximate

Suvorov's Swiss Campaign: Over the Alps, 1799

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.

8 locations1/8 visitable

BooksApproximate

Anna Karenina: Moscow, Petersburg and Italy

Tolstoy's novel begins on a Moscow railway platform and ends on another. Between them Levin finds Kitty on a skating pond, Anna meets Vronsky off a train, and the lovers' story runs through snowstorms, a racecourse and a spa town before they flee to Italy. The nine stops follow the novel's order across Russia, Germany and Italy. Tolstoy rarely names the buildings, so most pins mark the station or town the scene points to.

9 locations5/9 visitable

HistoryApproximate

The Genpei War: From Uji to Dan-no-ura

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.

7 locations4/7 visitable

MythologyApproximate

El Dorado: Lake Guatavita and the Legend

The golden king who rafted out into a mountain lake in a coat of gold dust is a legend, first written down generations after the conquest. The gold, the Spanish expeditions, the draining of the lake and a small golden raft in a museum are history. The route follows both threads, and each stop says which is which: Quesada's march in 1537, the lake itself, the drainage, a rival lake, the cave where a raft turned up in 1969 and the Bogotá museum that keeps it.

7 locations3/7 visitable

HistoryApproximate

Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow: Maloyaroslavets to the Berezina

On 19 October 1812 the Grande Armée walked out of Moscow after five weeks of occupation. Six weeks later, what was left of it scrambled across the Berezina on two hastily built bridges. In between lay a blocked road, a burning town, a depleted depot, a blizzard and a river full of ice. The route follows six places on that march, from the mined Kremlin through Maloyaroslavets, Vyazma, Smolensk and Krasny to the crossing at Studienka. Most pins mark a town or village, not a battlefield.

6 locations3/6 visitable

BooksFictional

War and Peace: Austerlitz, Borodino, Moscow

Tolstoy's huge novel carries its aristocratic families from the drawing rooms of 1805 into the wars against Napoleon, and its battlefields are among the most famous in fiction: a forgotten battery, a wounded prince staring at the sky, a civilian in a white hat on the wrong hill at the right moment. The route follows the book from a Moscow house and a country estate through Schöngrabern and Austerlitz to 1812: Borodino, the council at Fili and Napoleon waiting on Poklonnaya Hill. Some stops are real places Tolstoy wrote about, others are real stand-ins for places that exist only in the novel; each says which. Dates follow the modern calendar, with Tolstoy's Old Style date noted where it differs.

8 locations6/8 visitable

HistoryApproximate

Napoleon's Hundred Days: From Elba to Waterloo

On 26 February 1815 Napoleon slipped away from Elba with some 1,000 men. Within a month he was back in the Tuileries, and by mid-July he had surrendered to the Royal Navy. The route follows him stop by stop: his villa on Elba, the landing at Golfe-Juan, the meeting at Laffrey and the entry into Grenoble on the Route Napoléon, the Tuileries, the farms of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte at Waterloo, then Malmaison and Île d'Aix, where his journey ended. The pins at Golfe-Juan and Grenoble mark the towns, not exact spots.

9 locations7/9 visitable

GamesFictional

Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag: Nassau and the Observatory

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.

8 locations7/8 visitable

MoviesFictional

Jurassic Park: From Kauaʻi to Kualoa Ranch

Jurassic Park (1993) invents a dinosaur theme park on an island that does not exist, then shoots almost all of it on one small Hawaiian island, Kauaʻi. On 11 September 1992, the last scheduled day of the Kauaʻi shoot, Hurricane Iniki passed directly over the island and pushed one famous sequence to a ranch on Oʻahu. Nine stops follow the film in story order: the garden of the opening attack, the stream that played a Dominican amber mine, the Kapaʻa waterfront that played a Costa Rica café, the falls every visitor flies past, the estate where the visitor centre façade stood, the gates below Mount Waiʻaleʻale, the canyon of the dead fence, the Gallimimus stampede at Kualoa Ranch and the garden where Grant finds the nest. Filming on Kauaʻi began on 24 August 1992.

9 locations5/9 visitable

GamesFictional

Assassin's Creed Unity: Revolutionary Paris

Arno Dorian is a nobleman who walks into a trap: framed for the murder of the man who adopted him, he spends the opening hours of Unity's Paris of 1789 in a prison cell, and walks out of it an Assassin. From there he is off across the capital hunting the true powers behind the Revolution, while Napoleon, Robespierre and an Apple of Eden keep arriving before he can finish the job. Unity rebuilds late 18th-century Paris at roughly 1:1 scale across seven districts, plus Versailles, so almost every stop here is a building you can walk to: the Bastille site, the Assassins' hideout under the Île Saint-Louis, Notre-Dame's towers, the storming of the Tuileries, the execution square that is now the Place de la Concorde, Robespierre at the Hôtel de Ville, and — with the Dead Kings expansion — a Precursor temple under the basilica at Saint-Denis. Two stops are places the game invented rather than built: that hideout and that temple.

9 locations8/9 visitable

HistorySpeculative

The Haitian Revolution: From Bois Caïman to Independence

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.

7 locations1/7 visitable

MythologySpeculative

Odysseus Across the Wine-Dark Sea

After ten years at Troy, Odysseus sets sail for his island home of Ithaca and takes another ten to get there: blown off course, he meets a man-eating Cyclops, a witch who turns his crew into pigs, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis and a nymph who will not let him go, losing every ship and every companion on the way. Homer's Odyssey, composed around the late 8th century BC, has been read as a map for as long as it has been read. Already in antiquity the poem's places were linked to real coasts, mostly around Sicily and southern Italy. Those identifications are traditions, not facts, and the ancient geographer Eratosthenes doubted them all — so most pins here are marked speculative.

9 locations9/9 visitable