Australia

6 routes

Real JourneysApproximate

Miklouho-Maclay: The Maclay Coast of New Guinea

A Russian student expelled from university in 1864 ends up living among people in north-eastern New Guinea who had never seen a European. Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay was a zoologist and anthropologist, an early follower of Darwin who refuted the view that human races were different species. The route follows him from Haeckel's Jena and the Canary Islands to Astrolabe Bay, the Sydney research station he founded, and his grave in St Petersburg. Most pins are approximate: the sources name regions, not camps.

6 locations2/6 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Apollo 11: From Pad 39A to the Pacific

On 16 July 1969 a Saturn V lifted the Apollo 11 crew off a Florida launch pad; eight days later their capsule dropped into the Pacific. In between, the first people walked on another world while an estimated 600 million watched on Earth. The route follows the mission through six stops: the launch pad in Florida, Mission Control in Houston, Tranquility Base on the Moon, the Australian dish that carried the moonwalk pictures, the splashdown and the capsule's museum home. The Moon stop has no pin because the map shows Earth only; its lunar coordinates are given in the text.

6 locations3/6 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Amundsen and Scott: The Race to the South Pole

In 1910 two expeditions set out for the bottom of the world. Roald Amundsen's Norwegians, masters of skis and sled dogs, reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911. Robert Falcon Scott's party arrived on 17 January 1912, 34 days later, to find a Norwegian tent already standing. Amundsen sent his news from Hobart; Scott's party of five died on the return journey. The route follows both men from Cardiff and Madeira to their bases, up their two glaciers, to the Pole and to the endings: Amundsen's cables from Hobart and Scott's last camp. Antarctic pins mark glaciers and bays, not camps, and the ice has moved since.

10 locations1/10 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Captain Cook's First Voyage: Round the World in the Endeavour

On 26 August 1768 the Endeavour left Plymouth with 94 people aboard, bound for Tahiti to watch Venus cross the Sun. Almost three years later she anchored off the Kent coast again, having reached New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, and with many of her people lost to disease on the way home. The route follows James Cook's own journal and modern accounts through ten stops, from the anchorage at Plymouth to the Great Barrier Reef and Batavia. Dates follow modern accounts, which sometimes differ by a day from the journal.

10 locations7/10 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Lion: Saroo's Long Way Home

In about 1986 a boy of five or six fell asleep on an empty train in central India and woke up nearly 1,500 kilometres away in Calcutta, unable to name his home town. Adopted by a couple in Tasmania, Saroo Brierley found his way back 25 years later by tracing railway lines on Google Earth. His memoir A Long Way Home became the 2016 film Lion, with Dev Patel as the grown-up Saroo and Nicole Kidman as his adoptive mother. The route follows the real journey, which the film tells closely, from Khandwa station to Burhanpur, Howrah and Hobart, and back to Khandwa. Family homes are private and not pinned.

7 locations2/7 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Tracks: Robyn Davidson Across Australia

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.

7 locations4/7 visitable