Catalog
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 was fought at Port Arthur, on the Yalu River, at Mukden and in the Tsushima Strait, and ended at Portsmouth, Maine. This route follows the war from the first night attack on Port Arthur in February 1904 to the peace treaty signed in September 1905. Battlefields are pinned approximately; only the Mikasa and the Portsmouth shipyard are exact.
Lafcadio Hearn's Japan runs from Matsue Castle and Izumo Taisha to Kumamoto, Yaizu and Akama Shrine in Shimonoseki, home of the Kwaidan ghost tale of Hōïchi the Earless. The route follows his years as a teacher and writer: the samurai house in Matsue, a railway station scene from Kokoro, a fishing town he wrote about, and the shrine that keeps Hōïchi's statue. Hearn does not name the Kumamoto station, so that pin is approximate.
The Trans-Siberian Railway runs 9,289 kilometres from Moscow's Yaroslavsky Station across Krasnoyarsk, Lake Baikal and Khabarovsk to Vladivostok, crossing a record eight time zones. The line was begun in 1891 and finished only when the Amur bridge opened in 1916. This route follows it west to east through five landmarks: the two matching terminal stations, the great Yenisei bridge, the loop line around Baikal and the long Amur crossing.
Antoni Gaudí's Barcelona runs from Casa Vicens in Gràcia and Palau Güell in El Raval to Park Güell, Casa Batlló, La Pedrera and the Sagrada Família. Follow the architect from his first major house in 1883 to the tram accident of June 1926. Most stops are open to visitors; the exact spot of the accident is approximate.
The Hunger Games was filmed almost entirely in North Carolina: District 12 is the abandoned Henry River Mill Village, the arena is DuPont State Forest with Triple Falls, and the Capitol parade rolls through Charlotte. The sequels moved to Atlanta, where Swan House, the Goat Farm Arts Center and the Marriott Marquis stand in for Snow's mansion, the District 12 Justice Building and the Capitol tribute center. This route follows the story from the reaping to the Hanging Tree, with eight real places and what each one plays in the films. Some sites, such as Henry River Mill Village, are private, so check the guidance before you go.
The Devil Wears Prada is set in New York and Paris, and was shot in both: the office tower that plays Runway's parent company, the Smith & Wollensky steakhouse, the American Museum of Natural History and the Fontaines de la Concorde, where Andy drops her phone. The route follows her from the job interview to the Paris trip and back to the newsroom where she ends up. The crew spent only two days in the real Paris, filming exteriors only.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? was shot almost entirely in Mississippi, from Leland's handcar railway to the Canton square and the Yazoo City bank. The baptism lake outside Vicksburg and the closing shot at Edwards are here too. Three convicts break out of a chain gang in 1937 and go looking for a buried treasure before the valley is flooded. This route follows the film from the blind prophet on the handcar to the barn that burns, the radio session that makes the Soggy Bottom Boys famous, the sirens at D'Lo Water Park, the Canton rally and the Vicksburg gala, and ends at the Edwards crossing that closes the picture.
Zhmurki (Dead Man's Bluff, 2005) is set in 1990s Nizhny Novgorod, and Aleksei Balabanov filmed it there: in the Kovalikhinsky Baths, at Vodnik Stadium, by the Church of Elijah and in the Sirotkin House. This route follows seven locations of Balabanov's black comedy about bandits of the 1990s, from the bathhouse that played a morgue to the house of the final showdown. Several stops have changed since the shoot, and one is closed to visitors.
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth sends Ichiban Kasuga to Honolulu. The developers rebuilt a compressed stretch of the city, from the sand of Aloha Beach to the markets of Chinatown, mixing real streets, shops and landmarks with renamed and invented ones. This route follows that Honolulu from Waikiki into downtown: Waikiki Beach, the International Market Place, the Ala Wai Canal bridge, Ala Moana Center, Iolani Palace and Chinatown. Names and distances have changed — Anaconda Shopping Center stands in for Ala Moana, Aloha Beach for Waikiki — but most of the streets and buildings are recognisable. It is a tour of a real city as a game remembers it.
Two Dickens novels, one city of thieves' dens, prisons and cramped lodgings. Oliver Twist is dragged into Fagin's gang in the lanes of Holborn, while Pip of Great Expectations arrives from the Kent marshes expecting a soft white city and finds filth. The route follows Oliver and Nancy from Saffron Hill to London Bridge, Jacob's Island and Newgate, then Pip from Cooling churchyard through Rochester to Little Britain and Barnard's Inn. Several places are traditional models rather than named settings, and each pin says so.
In January 1817 General José de San Martín led an army out of Mendoza and over the Andes to free Chile from Spanish rule. The crossing took 21 days, and the feat has been compared to Hannibal's and Napoleon's crossings of the Alps. The route follows the campaign from the hill monument in Mendoza and the El Plumerillo camp, over the two passes the columns used, to the victories at Chacabuco and Maipú. The mountain stops are pinned approximately; the passes are long, and the army's exact tracks are not.
In the spring of 1890 the playwright and doctor Anton Chekhov left Moscow, crossed Siberia and sailed to Sakhalin, a convict island north of Japan, to count its inhabitants one by one. He kept the plan secret until January, travelled 82 days across Siberia, and came home months later by sea. The route follows his way from his Moscow house through Tomsk, Irkutsk and the Amur to the penal posts of Sakhalin and back to Vladivostok. Several pins mark whole towns, because Chekhov's lodgings are not recorded.
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.
The BBC's Sherlock Holmes and his flatmate, army doctor John Watson, solve crimes in present-day London, from a killer's phone traced to their own doorstep to a dominatrix with compromising photographs and a criminal who cracks the Crown Jewels from his mobile. Six stops follow the first three series in order: the 221B front door on North Gower Street, the Baker Street museum, a summons to Buckingham Palace, Moriarty's Tower heist, the hospital rooftop finale and a bomb under Parliament. Most stops are London landmarks you can see from the street; the 221B door is a private house, and the palace, Tower, hospital and Parliament appear as the show's story settings.
Liberty City is New York with the labels peeled off. Grand Theft Auto IV rebuilds four of the boroughs, borrows New Jersey for the state across the river, and copies in the Statue of Liberty, the Coney Island Cyclone, the Manhattan Bridge, Times Square and the Empire State Building — then renames nearly all of them, so the game's Liberty statue holds a takeaway coffee instead of a torch. The story is set in 2008, the year the game arrived. This route pins nine real places behind those names: the triumphal arch at Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza, the wooden Cyclone at Coney Island, the Manhattan Bridge as the Algonquin Bridge, Brighton Beach as Hove Beach, the surviving 1964 World's Fair site in Queens, and three Manhattan landmarks — Middle Park, Star Junction and the Rotterdam Tower. Each stop names the in-game location it stands in for. One caveat: Rockstar deliberately avoided a precise recreation of New York, so expect the landmarks, not the street plan.
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.