Walk Around the World in Eighty Days, with Phileas Fogg
A wager at the Reform Club, a valet called Passepartout and a timetable good to the minute. Your everyday steps take you round the world with Phileas Fogg, and Verne's words unlock at each place on the way.
- 23,000 miles
- 15 stops
- Jules Verne, 1873
Round the world, on schedule
Phileas Fogg wagers half his fortune over a game of whist, leaves the same evening having packed nothing, and circles the planet by steamer, rail, sledge and elephant on a timetable good to the minute. Twenty-three thousand miles, and the whole novel is a man refusing to be hurried.
Phileas Fogg bets half his fortune that he can go round the world in eighty days, and leaves the same evening. He goes by rail and steamer to Suez and Bombay, across India, partly by elephant where the railway isn't finished, then on to Calcutta, Singapore, Hong Kong and Yokohama. He crosses the Pacific to San Francisco, takes the train across America and the Atlantic to Liverpool.
It's the most famous travel race in fiction, twenty-three thousand miles, and almost all of it on routes that really ran in 1872. Verne published the book the next year, and George Makepeace Towle's translation came out the same year. It is one of the longest journeys in the library, so it's one to walk at a brisk pace. Eighty days, if you like.
- Distance
- 23,000 miles (37,015 km)
- Stops
- 15, each with its own passage and plate
- Map
- The real world, on Apple Maps
- Text
- Jules Verne, translated by George M. Towle; Project Gutenberg ebook #103
Where it starts
“I shall be due in London in this very room of the Reform Club, on Saturday, the 21st of December, at a quarter before nine p.m.; or else the twenty thousand pounds, now deposited in my name at Baring’s, will belong to you, in fact and in right, gentlemen. Here is a cheque for the amount.”
Around the World in Eighty Days · translated by George M. Towle
This is the passage Bematist gives you the moment you set out. The other 14 wait at the places they happened, and the only way to read them is to walk there.
How long would eighty days take you?
Fogg needed eighty days and a great deal of money. Choose your own deadline, eighty days if you like, 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
15 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 from the Reform Club.
23,000 miles of Around the World in Eighty Days, on the walks you already take.
- For iPhone
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