The Mayflower's 1620 voyage runs from Scrooby in Nottinghamshire and Leiden in the Netherlands through Southampton, Dartmouth and Plymouth, England, to Provincetown and Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts.
The Pilgrims were English Separatists who left home for the Netherlands, then sailed for America in two ships. One, the Speedwell, kept leaking, so they crowded onto the Mayflower alone and finally sailed from Plymouth in September 1620, bound for Virginia.
This route follows them stop by stop, from the manor where their church met to the rock tradition names as their landing place. Plymouth Rock is a tradition, not a documented spot, and the stop says so.
The Via Francigena is the medieval pilgrim road from Canterbury Cathedral through France and Switzerland to St Peter's in Rome, recorded by Archbishop Sigeric around 990. This route follows it from Canterbury over the Great St Bernard Pass to Lucca, Siena and Viterbo.
Sigeric's return trip ran to 80 stages of about 20 km each, some 1,700 km in all. Pilgrims still walk it today. Stops are landmarks on the route, not proven overnight stays.
Kūkai (Kōbō Daishi) was born in Shikoku, studied in Xi'an and founded Shingon Buddhism at Jingo-ji, Tō-ji and Mount Kōya, where he is entombed at Okunoin.
The route follows the monk from his birthplace at Zentsū-ji to Qinglong Temple in Tang China, then back to the temples near Kyoto and the mountain retreat he asked for in 816. It ends at his mausoleum, where monks still bring him meals.
Nansō Satomi Hakkenden (Hakkenden) opens in Awa, today southern Chiba, with Takida Castle, Tateyama Castle and Mount Tomi in Chiba, then Koga Castle and Gyōtoku.
A lord's careless joke to his dog brings down a curse, and eight dog warriors are born from a princess's scattered prayer beads. The route follows the opening tale from the old castles of Awa to Princess Fuse's mountain, then the first dog warriors' duel at Koga and rescue at Gyōtoku.
The novel's Tateyama and Hōryūkaku are not the same as the real sites, so most pins are approximate.
Onimusha: Warlords is set around Inabayama Castle, today's Gifu Castle in Gifu, after the Battle of Okehazama; Onimusha 3 takes the samurai Samanosuke Akechi to Honnō-ji in Kyoto, then to Paris and Mont-Saint-Michel.
Capcom's demon-slaying samurai series borrows real battlefields and castles for its war against Nobunaga Oda and the demonic Genma. This route follows the plots of the first and third games, from Okehazama and Gifu to Kyoto, the Arc de Triomphe and Mont-Saint-Michel. The game versions of Kyoto, Paris and Mont-Saint-Michel are story settings only.
Saint Nicholas, the early Christian bishop of Myra, was born at Patara, served at Myra (modern Demre) and now rests in Bari, with more relics in Venice. This route follows his legend from Lycia to Nicaea, Gemiler Island and Apulia.
Historians know little of the real man, so the route follows the traditional story and the journey of his bones. It ends in 1087, when sailors carried them across the sea, and in the Venice church that holds more.
The Olympian gods' birthplaces are scattered across Greece: Zeus in a cave on Crete or on Mount Lykaion, Apollo and Artemis on Delos, Apollo's oracle at Delphi, and the gods' home on Mount Olympus.
The route follows the myths from Zeus's cradle to the mountain where the gods live. Ancient authors disagreed about where Zeus was born, so those first two stops are traditional claims, not proven sites.
The Buddha's story, as Buddhist tradition tells it, runs from Lumbini in Nepal, where he was born, through Bodh Gaya, Sarnath and Jetavana to Kushinagar, where he died. Each of these places can be visited today.
The route follows five stops in life order: birth, enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree, the first teaching at Sarnath, the monastery at Savatthi and the parinirvana. The dates are traditional; the accounts come from Buddhist scriptures and legends.
Russia's best-loved bogatyr was a peasant's son who could not walk until he was 33. Then he set out for Kiev, defended a city, killed a whistling monster in the forest and became the chief hero of Prince Vladimir's court.
The route follows the epic songs known as byliny, from his village near Murom to the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, where the relics of a real monk, Ilya Pechersky, are said by some to be the hero's. Legend and history are marked apart: the pins show where tradition puts the story, not proof that it happened.
Disguised as a beggar, a Belgian-French explorer walked into the forbidden city of Lhasa among pilgrims. Alexandra David-Néel and her adopted son Yongden stayed two months in 1924, then slipped away before the governor could act.
The route follows her from Kumbum, where she studied for years, across the Kyi to the Potala and the Monlam crowds, then on to Samye, Tsetang and Gyantse. Pins are area-level, and critics have disputed her account since 1972.
Sun Wukong is born from a stone on a flowery mountain and later guards a monk on the long road west to fetch the sutras. The novel is set on the road to India, but its geography is almost entirely fantasy.
This route follows five episodes in the novel's order and pins the real places that share their names or were later tied to them. Some are named in the text; Huaguo Shan and the Flaming Mountains are linked only by later tradition.
Walking the island of Shikoku from temple to temple, in the footsteps of the monk Kūkai, is one of Japan's oldest pilgrimages.
This route visits seven of the 88 temples, from Temple 1 in Tokushima to the finish at Temple 88, passing the four provinces, Kūkai's birthplace and the highest temple. The legends here are temple tradition, not proven history.
Japan's Kumano Kodō runs from Takijiri-oji through Chikatsuyu to Kumano Hongū Taisha, then by boat to Shingū and on to Nachi's stone steps and falls. For over a thousand years emperors, samurai and commoners walked these trails to the three grand shrines; Go-Shirakawa made the trip 34 times.
This route follows the Nakahechi from Takijiri-oji through Chikatsuyu and Hongū, by river to Shingū, then to Nachi's stone steps and waterfall. Some stops are pinned to the area rather than a surveyed spot.
The French Way is the most popular route of the ancient pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, It starts at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, crosses the Pyrenees, and from Roncesvalles on the Spanish side still runs about 780 kilometres west to Galicia. It is on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
This route follows it through seven landmarks: a mountain gate, a village of legend, a pilgrims' bridge, a great cathedral, a knights' tournament, a Galician hilltop and the tomb of St James.
The legend of Kitezh, the Russian Atlantis, says the city sank into Lake Svetloyar rather than fall to the Mongols. The route also visits Gorodets on the Volga, said to be Little Kitezh, and Kideksha near Suzdal, the name's folk origin. On calm days, they say, its bells can still be heard.
The route follows the story from the folk etymology of the name, through the town said to be Little Kitezh and the forests of the Kerzhenets, to the lake itself and the St Petersburg stage where the opera first sounded. Kitezh is a legend: the places are traditional identifications, not proof.
In June 1867 the steamship Quaker City left New York on what Mark Twain called his "Great Pleasure Excursion", a chartered trip to Europe and the Holy Land. A newspaper, the Alta California, paid for his place in exchange for fifty articles, and those letters grew into The Innocents Abroad.
This route follows eight stops: the Wall Street pier, the Azores, Tangier, Milan, Athens, a palace garden near Yalta, Jerusalem and the Sphinx. Each is told through Twain's own scenes, from donkey rides and hotel bills to the places that stopped his jokes. Where he does not name a spot, the pin marks the nearest known place.
A schoolgirl in Kyushu follows a stranger into an abandoned resort, opens a door that was meant to stay shut, and ends up chasing a cat across Japan, closing doors as she goes. Her last door stands in the hometown she lost to the 2011 tsunami.
The route follows her path in story order: Nichinan harbour, the Bungo-Mori roundhouse, Yawatahama port, a Kobe mountain, Ochanomizu and Hijiri Bridge in Tokyo, then Miyako and Orikasa Station in Iwate. The film is animated, so most pins mark places that Wikipedia says its scenes were modelled on, and the Kobe amusement park is disputed.
On the eve of his coronation, Prince Rama of Ayodhya is sent into the forest for fourteen years, so that his stepmother's son can rule. His wife Sita and brother Lakshmana go with him. In the forest Sita is carried off by Ravana, the demon king of Lanka, and Rama, helped by Hanuman and an army of vanaras, monkey-like forest people, crosses the sea to win her back. The Sanskrit epic attributed to Valmiki runs to some 24,000 verses and is still retold, staged and worshipped across South and Southeast Asia.
For centuries pilgrims have tied its episodes to real places, from Ayodhya to the hills of Sri Lanka. This route follows those traditional identifications, which are matters of faith and local memory rather than archaeology. Most of the stops are living temples.
Egypt, 49 BC. Bayek, the last Medjay protector of the Siwa Oasis, loses his son to a band of masked men, and his hunt for them leads him into the war between Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy XIII, and to the arrival of Julius Caesar. Ubisoft's 2017 game ends with Bayek and his wife Aya founding the secret brotherhood that the whole series grows from.
The studio worked with Egyptologists and historians, enlarged cities for a sense of "pharaonic scale", and later added a combat-free Discovery Tour. This route follows the main story through the real places it uses, from the oracle at Siwa to the spot in Rome where Caesar died. Bayek and the secret orders are fiction; the queen, the generals and the murders mostly are not.
In spring 1689 the poet Matsuo Bashō gave up his hut in Edo and set off on foot with his friend and disciple Kawai Sora into Oku, the remote north of Japan. For about 156 days and some 2,400 kilometres they walked to the places the old poets had made famous — a barrier gate, a bay of pine islands, a battlefield, a mountain temple — and Bashō answered them with haiku.
The travel diary he made of it, Oku no Hosomichi, published in 1702, is one of the classics of Japanese literature, and its stops are still pilgrimage sites. Bashō polished the facts for art; Sora's own diary shows where. Dates follow the old lunar calendar, so they are given here by season.
In November 1095 Pope Urban II, answering a Byzantine emperor's plea for help against the Seljuk Turks, called western Christians to an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Tens of thousands answered — knights, foot soldiers and poor pilgrims. Their armies took separate roads to Constantinople, then marched together across Anatolia and Syria. Almost four years after the call, they stormed Jerusalem and massacred much of its population.
The route follows the main armies in order, from Clermont to Jerusalem, using the participants' own chronicles as summarised by modern historians. Violence against Jews in the Rhineland and against the people of the cities on the way is part of the story and is named plainly. There are no travel tips for Syria or the Lebanese border area.
In 1324 Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, set out on the pilgrimage to Mecca with a caravan so rich in gold that Cairo talked about it for years. Arab chroniclers wrote of thousands of servants carrying gold bars and camels loaded with gold dust; historians today treat those numbers as a way of saying "more than anyone could imagine", not as a count. The Catalan Atlas of 1375 still shows him enthroned in the Sahara, holding up a piece of gold.
The route keeps to the places the sources actually record: the royal city of Mali, the camp below the pyramids, Cairo, Mecca, and Gao and Timbuktu on the way home. The road across the desert is not documented, so it is not drawn. The route offers no travel advice for Mali.
Jake Barnes, an American newspaperman wounded in the war, spends his Paris nights in the cafés of Montparnasse with Lady Brett Ashley — the woman he loves and cannot have. Then the whole crowd heads south: trout fishing in the Pyrenees, then a week of San Fermín in Pamplona, where drink, jealousy and a nineteen-year-old matador break everything open.
Hemingway built the novel from his own trips of 1924 and 1925, and almost every stop can still be visited: the café on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, the inn at Burguete, the arcade café on Pamplona's main square, the bullring, the beach at San Sebastián and the Madrid restaurant where the book's last meal is eaten.
