Walk Dracula, Munich to the Borgo Pass
Jonathan Harker's road east, from the night train out of Munich to a castle door in the Carpathians. Your everyday steps move you down it, and Stoker's own words unlock at the places he wrote them.
- 656 miles
- 8 stops
- Bram Stoker, 1897
Jonathan Harker's road east
The novel opens with a train timetable. A newly qualified solicitor's clerk travels east from Munich to close a property deal, keeping a careful journal and noting down recipes — and the further east he gets, the more people cross themselves as he passes.
Stoker gives the route almost to the hour. Harker leaves Munich on the night train, reaches Vienna an hour late, glimpses Buda-Pesth from the train, and crosses the Danube with the feeling that he is leaving the West and entering the East. The trains get slower and the people more superstitious. From Bistritz, the last town before the mountains, it's a coach into the Carpathians and, at midnight on the Borgo Pass, a calèche that nobody admits to sending.
Stoker never went to Transylvania. He put Harker's road together from travel books and a borrowed map, and got it right enough that you can still follow it: Bistritz is Bistrița in northern Romania, and the Borgo Pass is the Tihuța Pass above it. In Bematist you walk it on a real map, 656 miles from the Munich station to the castle door.
- Distance
- 656 miles (1,056 km)
- Stops
- 8, each with its own passage and plate
- Map
- The real world, on Apple Maps
- Text
- Bram Stoker; Project Gutenberg ebook #345
Where it starts
3 May. Bistritz.—Left Munich at 8:35 P. M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible.
Dracula, Chapter I · Jonathan Harker's Journal
This is the passage Bematist gives you the moment you set out. The other 7 wait at the places they happened, and the only way to read them is to walk there.
How long would Dracula take you?
Harker covered it in four days by train and coach. You can take as long as you like. Pick when you'd like to arrive and Bematist sets the pace from how much you already walk.
A rough guide, at about 0.75 m a step. In the app the pace comes from your own 30-day average in Apple Health, and stays fixed for the whole journey.
On the way
The words, at the places
8 passages, each waiting where it happened. You can see how far away the next one is, but not what it says.
Walk it with friends
Send a link and walk the same road together, each of you on your own streets, wherever you live.
No streak to lose
Steps come straight from Apple Health. A quiet day is just a short one, and your place on the road only moves forward.
More roads like this one
See the whole library, with a new book every month, chosen by walkers' vote.
Set out for the Borgo Pass.
656 miles of Dracula, on the walks you already take.
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