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U2 was here—and so were thousands of fans who managed to find the remote Mojave Desert location of the very Joshua tree depicted in the photo series accompanying U2's 1987 album. The tree has died and now lies in brittle bits and pieces. Photo by Steve Hall.

Satellite views of the Earth plus the advent of digital photography and remote communication technology have rendered virtually no place on the planet unexplored—or unseen, anyway. To be an explorer in the old days was a legitimate and noble occupation, but traveling today is much less about first-time discovery than it is about rediscovery. But there is a particular thrill in going where certain others have gone before, to walk where they walked and to know that their eyes, too, played across the very landscape before you. So forget the world’s last lingering corners of wilderness for a moment, or the last unsettled islands, and consider these special sites of interest where writers, artists, musicians and heroes once walked:

The toppled Joshua tree. On a cold December day in 1986, the biggest budding rock band of the time—a group of young Irishmen known as U2—walked into the Mojave desert with photographer Anton Corbijn, posed before a lanky-limbed Joshua tree and created one of the most famous rock and roll image galleries, portrayed on the album sleeve of U2′s 1987 album The Joshua Tree. The images spurred a quiet pilgrimage of followers seeking to locate the Joshua tree—the Joshua tree, that is, the one shown on the album. The site is located near Death Valley, and presumably the first U2 fan to locate the place found it by following the skyline seen in the famed black and white photographs. Today, the tree itself lies fallen and broken, while a shrine and plaque, a variety of stone-based artwork and four stone circles indicating where each U2 band member once stood still give visitors a chilling sense of rediscovery.

The Slaughtered Lamb pub. “I vote we go back to The Slaughtered Lamb.” So said Jack Goodman, played by Griffin Dunne, to his friend David Kessler in the 1981 horror cult classic An American Werewolf in London. Two young American men, students on vacation, were walking on the cold, wild moors of Northern England not far from a fictional village called East Proctor. The pair had just left the town’s spooky village pub, The Slaughtered Lamb, where a bizarre cast of locals sent the Americans packing with crazy talk suggesting monsters and witchcraft. But some distance out of the town, piercing half-man howls echoed through the fog and scared Jack and David back again toward the pub—but a werewolf got them first. Jack was killed, and David, played by David Naughton, was rendered a once-per-month monster whose own days would soon end after a bloody rampage in the streets of London. Today, the village of Crickadarn, Wales, which portrayed East Proctor, remains a vaguely known source of attraction for traveling film buffs. If you go, stick to the road, keep clear of the moors and take some good pics—and perhaps post driving directions in the comment box below. Heads up: The interior of The Slaughtered Lamb is actually in The Black Swan, a pub in Ockham, Surrey, in case you should want a pint.

Cephalonia, home island of Odysseus. Just which Aegean waters Homer’s hero stirred and which Greek islands he passed as he voyaged home from Troy may be unclear, but we may know just where Odysseus landed at the journey’s end, the island he called home. Named Ithaca in The Odyssey, the home island of Odysseus is believed to be that now called Cephalonia, off Greece’s west coast, as described in Smithsonian in 2006. An amateur scholar named Robert Bittlestone made this claim after studying translations of Homer’s narration and touring possible islands in Greece, surveying the landscapes and imagining just where was the likeliest abode of Odysseus. The modern-day island of Ithaca seems not to be the old Ithaca—but on Cephalonia, Bittlestone believes he can even trace the footsteps of Odysseus from the moment he came ashore at Phorcys Bay to the hut of the benevolent swineherd to—at last—the cone-shaped hill called Kastelli, where Odysseus’ wife Penelope and their son Telemachus endured for years the hounding of suitors and drunkards—men who died in a bloody, skull-crashing fight when Odysseus finally walked through his door. Should you go to Cephalonia, bring along a pair of binoculars and a copy of the Odyssey, perhaps the truest guidebook there is to this lesser-known Greek island.

Cephalonia, off of western Greece, might be the island where Odysseus—or his real-life prototype—lived. Photo courtesy of Flickr user The Photo Factory by Christel Egberts.

Fairbanks City Bus 142. The broken-down bus in which a young man lived his final days in Alaska in 1992 has become an attraction for back-country visitors in recent years. Made famous by Jon Krakauer in his 1995 book Into the Wild, Chris McCandless, who took up the alias Alexander Supertramp, has been the subject of scorn, sympathy and admiration. He came to the interior Alaskan bush country with idealistic visions of living off the land in a place void of human contact and government control—but things didn’t go well. Though he had a rifle, he failed to feed himself adequately, and after more than 100 days in the wild, he died of starvation inside the retired Fairbanks city bus. McCandless’ tribe of followers exploded in numbers following the 2007 movie adaptation of Krakauer’s book, and today many—too many, perhaps—visit the bus each summer and fall, posing for photos exactly as McCandless did, signing their names inside the bus and taking pieces away. Locals have begun to consider the defunct vehicle an attractive nuisance. Though the bus has long served as a campsite for local hunters, there has been talk of removing it from the bush. Go see this piece of junk while you can.

Steinbeck Country. It’s sunburned, desolate and populated by pigs and cougars—and everywhere you go in the hill country of California’s Monterey and San Benito Counties, you are likely to be viewing the same wild country that inspired the writing of John Steinbeck. While you have a sure bet at mingling with the ghosts of Steinbeck’s past at tourist hubs like Cannery Row, the real excitement lies farther afield—where one might explore the scrubby back country and ask of suspect homesteads, trees and road crossings: “Was Steinbeck here?” Eight years ago while exploring California on a long bicycle tour, this very question came to me, along with a strange and eerie feeling in my gut, when I came upon a lonely intersection in Monterey County, far from any stores or farms or gas stations. I was riding northward on Peach Tree Road, parallel to and east of the Salinas Valley, and came to the junction with Long Valley Road, which led deep into the hill country to the west. I instantly recalled Steinbeck’s The Long Valley and felt with certainty that the author had walked up this road in its unpaved days, through these dry expanses of classic California oak and scrub, absorbing impressions of the land that would later move him to write. But in the lonely hills of Steinbeck Country, fiction overlays reality, and whether here once was a god unknown, or a red pony, or a man named Adam Trask—who really knows but the writer who invented them all?

There are many other literary journeys, sites to see and paths to follow:

Jack Kerouac‘s route in On the Road. Kerouac disguised many of his real-life characters with clever pseudonyms in On the Road, yet travelers and journalists seem to have pinned down where he went, drank, ate and slept, from San Luis Obispo to Colorado to New York.

The pond and cabin of Henry David Thoreau‘s Walden days.

The Overlook Hotel of The Shining. Film director Stanley Kubrick relied on multiple locations, including a set in England, for shooting his 1980 horror hit, but for a face-to-face, head-on look at the hotel that swallowed up the Torrance family for a long, frightening winter, head straight to the Timberline Lodge in Oregon.

The Abbey Road crossing in London as seen on the Beatles album. Should you go, take three long-haired friends, set up a camera and don’t forget the most important part: One of you must walk barefoot.

The Fairbanks city bus in which Chris McCandless died of starvation in 1992 has become a tourist attraction. This photo was taken in 2011. Photo by Dave Korn.

The author facing off with the edge of the world, where the gray and blustery waters of the Southern Ocean meet the rocks of Curio Bay, in the Catlins. Photo by Geoff Green.

Some residents of Christchurch may feel the world has forgotten them in their tremulous days of earthquake-related stress and recovery. But another part of New Zealand has hardly been discovered: the green hills, thick forests and southernmost Kiwi coastline of the Catlins. To even see this place on a globe, one must lift it upward to expose the underbelly of the planet, and a northerner like me who ventures down here may get the prickly, precarious feeling that, should he trip or falter too near the shore, he might fall off the bottom of the Earth.

A main claim to fame of the Catlins is the area’s high latitude. Slope Point is the southernmost spot of land on the South Island, at 46 degrees, 40 minutes south. Oh, come on, now. Don’t raise your eyebrows and whistle like that. Seattle, for example, boasts a latitude of 47 degrees, and Glasgow goes just under 56 degrees. Yet I’ll grant that the Catlins are farther south than Tasmania, than Cape Town and than most cities in South America. This is, indeed, among the southernmost settled areas on the planet.

As I zeroed in, the world grew quiet. Sheep became more populous and people scarcer, and the abandoned dairy houses and community halls I passed, all locked up and grown over with weeds, looked like prime ghost habitat. My 3G internet connection petered out and died at about 46 degrees, 20 minutes south, and I was left frightfully alone in a world where even climbers at the top of Everest can send text messages to their mothers. I entered the region’s large town, Gore, and though it is heralded as the “brown trout capital of the world,” Gore had evidently seen better days. Almost no one was out and about. On its main drag, many businesses appeared shuttered, and defunct relics of infrastructure along the train tracks told of a livelier economic era that had withered.

In the village of Waimahaka, in spite of an auto garage, a school and a “community centre,” I saw not a soul, though—like an old cliché borrowed from a film—a radio happened to be playing that saddest song of the homeless drifter, “Lodi,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Several miles later, I caught a scent of the sea on a cool breeze. The hills, as green as the sky was gray, reminded me of coastal Scotland. So did the names printed on mailboxes, like Holmes, Heaps and Airlie, Buckingham, McPherson and Alcock. Sheep by the thousands grazed in the fields along the roads, but I saw nobody tending them. Over a hill came my first glance of the Southern Ocean—that brutal unbroken circumglobal ring of churning waters that had been generating icy headwinds for days. I hit the coast at Fortrose, a salty village of shacks decorated with clam and abalone shells. I immediately dug up several dozen cockles from the sandy bay and packed them away for dinner, and along the highway I bought all my vegetables from honesty boxes—and not until I entered the campground in Curio Bay that night did I speak to someone, a man named Geoff from Yorkshire on his way to Dunedin to seek out several long-lost cousins who emigrated to New Zealand in the 1950s and, subsequently, might as well have vanished into thin air.

I walked to the beach just after sunrise, and there on the rocks, standing tall and handsome and all suited up, were my first wild penguins. Called hoiho in the Maori language, the yellow-eyed penguin is said to be the rarest in the world. I came to within about 30 feet from the oblivious birds, which, like so many creatures here, evolved without predators and without fear. The federal government has even imposed a legal approach limit of 10 meters to protect the naïve birds, for one could probably walk up to one and carry it away.

At Curio Bay, visitors are reminded to leave at least 10 meters between themselves and the penguins that come ashore here, which pay no regard to the humans who may approach them.

At midday I collected a limit of 50 mussels and cooked half on the beach near the Cathedral Caves, saving the rest for dinner. I had been sleeping for free whenever possible but that evening paid $14 for a campsite in Pounawea. In a heavy drizzle at dawn, I pedaled 35 kilometers to Balclutha, where I stayed at the country cottage of two friends who live in the outskirts. One of them, Chris Muggeridge, is a transplanted chef from the North Island and, with business partner Daniel Hauser, recently opened a tapas restaurant called Hause Made on Balclutha’s main drag at 55 Clyde Street. Locals, Muggeridge says, have been cautious but inquisitive about these flavorful things called “tapas” and while Christmastime brought some business, many guests “were asking where the steaks were,” Muggeridge says. For this is beef and mutton country, and small plates of spicy, aromatic Mediterranean-influenced food is an exotic novelty here—way, way down here at 46-plus degrees south. Muggeridge and Hauser even believe their restaurant might be the southernmost tapas joint on Earth.

I rode my bike to Kaka Point one afternoon to collect mussels at low tide, and in a deeper pool, as I looked for abalone, I saw the tail of a large fish nestled in a crevice. A moment later, lying on my belly, I had it pinned and spent about 60 seconds with both arms in the water, my head half submerged, skirmishing with the struggling animal to get a grip in its mouth. Finally, I emerged with a thrashing fish nearly two feet long with a head like a toad’s and vacant eyes as black as a Patagonian toothfish‘s. I flipped through my New Zealand ocean regulations booklet; the fish, near as I could deem, was a legal catch, so I dispatched it. On my way home, I stopped at Hause Made so Muggeridge could have a look. “It’s what we call ‘rock cod’,” he said—though we failed later that night through Internet searches to pinpoint the creature’s Latin name, which is what really counts in the murky seafood world of “cod,” “sea bass,” “snapper,” and so much other generic nomenclature.

Adventures will continue as surely as my wheels roll, but, sadly, I must start north for Christchurch, for I am at that point in my journey where the days left can be counted on two hands. How I cursed those blustery Antarctic southerlies for days as I came south—but those same gales may soon be my dearest friend as I ascend northward, over the face of the Earth, climbing the parallels like rungs of a ladder, into the latitudes of people, dependable Internet access and a selection of tapas bars.

The author pulled this fish from the tidepools at Kaka Point with just his hands. What, exactly, is it?

What's tougher: Rugby or American football? Photo credit: Tim Clayton / 101010 / Corbis

Super Bowl Sunday is coming up, and I’ve been asking local pubs here on the South Island of New Zealand if one might be able to catch the world’s biggest game on television.

But the national sport of New Zealand is rugby, and the Super Bowl is not an event that many locals make bowls of guacamole and invite friends over for. It sounds like football fans in Kiwi land could be hard-pressed to find venues showing the match. In the seaside town of Kaikoura, one bartender told me he didn’t plan on airing the game and said I’d probably be the only person in town looking to watch the Super Bowl. The bar manager at Strawberry Tree, a worn and salty old watering hole on Kaikoura’s main and only drag, said that American football is too slow-paced to watch on TV.

“Rugby is 80 minutes nonstop,” said Stephen Horton, who also plays lock and open-side on Kaikoura’s regional team. “And in football, you have two lines of players that switch at every play, right?”

Right—defense and offense. So, what are you saying, I asked Stephen—that football players are padded, coddled softies? Do you think they’re less durable than rugby players?

“Oh, yeah!” he laughed. “Those guys wouldn’t last 80 minutes in a rugby match!”

Andrew and I raised our beers to that, noting to Stephen that the big-bellied beasts called linemen who may, by some stroke of chance, find the ball in their hands and run it in for an 80-yard touchdown can require oxygen masks in order to recover. This got Stephen and another Kiwi at the bar laughing—and certainly didn’t win toughness points for American footballers.

And so our conversation quickly took the form of one of the endless topics in sports talk: Are rugby players as tough as football players? Consider this quote I found recently on an online discussion: “NFL players are bigger, stonger (sic), faster. Almost all of them have college educations. The average NFL player could pick up the average Super 14 player, turn him upside down, and shake him like a piggy bank.”

But Stephen, like many New Zealanders, feels otherwise. “I definitely think rugby is harder,” he said, “but football looks more fun. You wear all that padding and can hit each other as hard as you want. You get hurt in rugby. I’ve had three broken collar bones and been knocked out three times.”

Rugby players are trained gentlemen, too. In New Zealand, they start playing at as young as four years of age, and even in adult leagues, swearing is forbidden during practice and “joking around,” Stephen explained, is curtailed by the coaches. Nor do players perform sometimes classless celebrations after scores or victories, as we see in the NFL.

Later in the week, in Blenheim, I stopped at the Moa Brewing Company for a beer—and to egg on more conversation. Here I met Michael Miller, an American living in New Zealand and working with the brewery. In eight months here Michael has picked up on the subtleties of rugby that American football lacks. “I don’t mean to be derogatory toward anyone, but rugby is more intellectual,” he said, explaining that, since they lack protective gear, the players must combat each other with exceptional technique. He likens the sport to “guerrilla warfare,” whereas the face-off-and-charge approach of the NFL is more “like Civil War” battle style. “Rugby can also be quite brutal,” Michael said, “but it’s also more beautiful and elegant.” He noted that rugby players must be skilled in tackling, running and handling the ball—all aspects of the game—whereas football players are specialized to certain techniques, making them less rounded as tactical athletes.

Having seen both games up close, Michael also feels that American football, much more than rugby, “has been evolved for commercialization and television.” Which explains the three-hour games, endless breaks and timeouts and the huge advertising campaigns that climax on Super Bowl day.

This T-shirt, spotted in a Kaikoura gift shop, reflects a common Kiwi impression of American footballers: They're wimps.

And I asked that pivotal question: Of rugby players and NFL footballer, who’s tougher?

“It would have to be the rugby guys,” he said. “You have to run nonstop. You can’t be a huge tuna-fish linebacker and play rugby.”

Back in Kaikoura, I asked Stephen if he’d be watching the Super Bowl, but no: He’d rather be on the local pitch playing some rugby or diving for paua or lobster off the beach. And me? If my hometown 49ers had won their way into the battle, I’d be hunting for a television in Christchurch—but I think I’ll go fly fishing.