Around the World in Eighty Days: Fogg's Wager

Fogg lives by the clock at No. 7 Savile Row and spends his days at the Reform Club on Pall Mall, reading the papers and playing whist. When his partners argue over a newspaper claim that the world can now be circled in eighty days, Fogg says he will do it himself and stakes £20,000. He leaves at 8.45 that evening and promises to be back in this room at 8.45 p.m. on Saturday 21 December. The club, founded in 1836 in a palazzo by Charles Barry, still stands.

Visitor guidance: The Reform Club is a private members' club; its façade on Pall Mall is seen from the street.

Paris, the Mont Cenis tunnel, Turin, Brindisi, then the steamer Mongolia: Fogg's notebook records every stage to the minute, and he reaches Suez on 9 October. Waiting on the quay is Detective Fix, who has a description of the man who robbed the Bank of England of £55,000 and decides it fits Fogg exactly. He needs a warrant to arrest him on British soil, and from here on he follows Fogg around the world. The Suez Canal had opened only three years earlier, in 1869.

Location precision: The novel doesn't describe the quay; the pin marks the town of Suez at the southern end of the canal.

The Mongolia makes Bombay two days early, on 20 October. Fogg ignores every sight in the city and goes to the passport office and the station. Passepartout, sightseeing alone, walks into a temple on Malabar Hill in his shoes, is set upon by its priests and escapes barefoot, just in time to catch the train for Calcutta. The trains of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway left from the Bori Bunder terminus; its replacement, the Victoria Terminus (today Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus), opened in 1888 on a site just to the north.

Location precision: The 1872 station is gone; the pin marks Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, built beside the old Bori Bunder site.

Visitor guidance: Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus is a working station and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

At the hamlet of Kholby the train simply stops: the newspapers were wrong, and fifty miles of track to Allahabad are not yet laid. Fogg buys an elephant for £2,000, and on the way through the forest his party rescues a young widow, Aouda, about to be burned on her husband's funeral pyre. They reach Allahabad, where the line begins again, and on 25 October arrive in Calcutta, where Passepartout's shoes from the temple turn up in court as evidence. Kholby and the temple of Pillaji are invented.

Location precision: Kholby and Pillaji are fictional; the pin marks Allahabad (Prayagraj), where the travellers rejoin the railway.

In Hong Kong, Fix lures Passepartout into an opium house and drugs him so that he cannot warn his master that the steamer Carnatic is leaving early. Passepartout staggers aboard alone; Fogg and Aouda are left behind. Unruffled, Fogg hires the Tankadere, a twenty-ton pilot boat, and its master John Bunsby to sail him through a typhoon to Shanghai, where he catches the steamer to Yokohama. Fix, who still hopes to arrest him in a British colony, goes along as his guest.

Location precision: The novel's quays and opium house can't be placed; the pin marks Victoria Harbour.

Penniless in Yokohama, Passepartout signs on with a troupe of acrobats, the Long Noses, who perform with enormous false noses under the patronage of the god Tengu ("Tingou" in the novel). He is the base of their human pyramid when he spots his master in the audience — and brings the whole pyramid down as he rushes to him. Reunited, the party sails across the Pacific on the General Grant, crossing the date line without anyone noticing what it will mean at the end.

Location precision: The circus is fictional; the pin marks central Yokohama.

Fogg lands in San Francisco on 3 December and has a few hours before the overland train. Walking up Montgomery Street — "to San Francisco what Regent Street is to London" — the travellers are swept into a noisy election meeting that turns into a brawl, and Fogg is punched by a rough American, Colonel Stamp Proctor, whom he vows to meet again. That evening they board the train for New York on the Pacific Railroad, finished only three years before.

Location precision: The meeting's exact place isn't given; the pin marks Montgomery Street in the Financial District.

In Nebraska a Sioux war party attacks the train. Passepartout climbs under the cars and uncouples the engine, and the train stops close to Fort Kearney station, whose soldiers drive the attackers off — but Passepartout and two others have been carried away. Fogg goes after them with thirty soldiers and brings them back, losing a precious day. To catch up, he crosses the frozen prairie to Omaha on a sledge with sails. Verne gives the fort a garrison, but the real Fort Kearny had closed in 1871.

Location precision: The fight takes place on the line near the station; the pin marks the site of old Fort Kearny on the Platte River.

Visitor guidance: Fort Kearny State Historical Park, south-east of Kearney, has a reconstructed stockade on the old fort site.

Fogg misses his steamer in New York by 45 minutes, hires the Henrietta and burns her woodwork for fuel to cross the Atlantic. On 21 December, at twenty minutes to twelve, he steps onto the Liverpool quay — and Fix arrests him in the Queen's name. Locked in the Custom House, he is freed when the real robber turns out to have been caught days before, but reaches London too late. Then comes the twist: travelling east, he gained a day. He walks into the Reform Club at 8.45 exactly.

Location precision: The Custom House was bombed in 1941 and demolished in 1948; the pin marks its former site.