Kazuma Kiryu's Kamurocho feels like a real Tokyo night out because it nearly is: Sega modelled it on Kabukicho, then did the same with Dotonbori, Shinsekai, Yokohama and the port town of Onomichi. Every district in the series is based on its real location as it looked in the year its game came out, and later games remodel them again.
This route walks the six real stand-ins behind the fiction in the order the games introduced them: Kabukicho's sleepless streets, the theater square, Dotonbori's neon canal, Shinsekai's tower, Onomichi's temple slopes and Yokohama's Isezaki Mall. All six are ordinary public places you can visit today.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty goes from the Time-Life Building in New York to Iceland, where Stykkishólmur doubles for Greenland, Seyðisfjörður hosts the longboard descent and Skógafoss stands in for the Himalayas. Ben Stiller's 2013 film follows a photo editor chasing a missing negative.
This route starts at Life's real Manhattan home and then follows Walter through the Icelandic towns, harbour, mountain road, volcano and waterfall that stand in for Greenland and Afghanistan. The places are real; which country they play is not.
Bond is shot off a train in Turkey and left for dead, while a former agent with a grudge against M attacks MI6 from within. Sam Mendes's 2012 film — the 23rd Bond and the highest-grossing of them all — was shot between November 2011 and May 2012 in London, Turkey and Scotland, with much of "Shanghai" and "Macau" faked in England.
The route follows the story from the rooftops of the Grand Bazaar to the railway viaduct where Bond falls, a beach bar in Fethiye, MI6's real headquarters, a Turner in the National Gallery, an abandoned Japanese island, a disused Tube platform and the glen where Bond takes M home. Skyfall Lodge itself was a set in Surrey.
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.
John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps sends Richard Hannay from a flat behind London's Langham Place onto the 7.10 from St Pancras and north to Galloway's Cairnsmore of Fleet and the spa town of Moffat, while a German spy ring hunts him. Hannay has three weeks to survive before he can warn the government. The title comes from a real stair in Broadstairs: 78 steps, not 39.
This is John Buchan's 1915 novel, not Hitchcock's very different film. London, St Pancras, Cairnsmore of Fleet and Moffat are named in the book; Hannay's hiding places on the moors and the Kent resort of Bradgate are not real, but the steps that gave the book its title are.
Breaking Bad was both set and filmed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and its car wash, motels, diners and Los Pollos Hermanos became as recognisable as the cast. Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher with stage-three lung cancer, starts cooking methamphetamine with a former student, Jesse Pinkman; Vince Gilligan's series ran on AMC from 2008 to 2013, 62 episodes in all.
This route visits seven places from the series and its film sequel, El Camino. Almost all of them are working businesses. The White and Pinkman houses are people's real homes and are deliberately left off the map.
Peter Jackson shot all three Lord of the Rings films at once, in 438 days between October 1999 and December 2000, at more than 150 locations across New Zealand's North and South Islands. Farmland became the Shire, a regional park became Rivendell, a lonely hill in Canterbury became the capital of Rohan, and a volcano in Tongariro National Park stood in for Mount Doom.
This route follows Frodo's story through eight of those places, most of them easy to visit. Some sets were rebuilt for visitors; others were removed and the land returned to how it was. The mountains of Tongariro are sacred to local Māori, so please admire the summits from below.
Into the Wild tells the true story of Christopher McCandless: he graduated from Emory University in Atlanta in 1990, paddled the Colorado River into Mexico, worked in Carthage, South Dakota, and in April 1992 walked onto the Stampede Trail outside Healy, Alaska. He died in an abandoned bus that August, aged 24. Jon Krakauer wrote the book in 1996; Sean Penn filmed it in 2007.
The route follows his documented trail. The Stampede Trail is dangerous, and this route is not an invitation to retrace the last part of it.
