The World In 72 Days By Nellie Bly

How to Actually Follow Nellie Bly's Route Today

Nellie Bly left New York on November 14, 1889, and got back 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes later. Most people who try to retrace her path either turn it into a vanity Instagram trip or get completely unprepared for the logistics. Neither approach works if you actually want to understand what she did. Here's how to do it properly. Her route ran eastward: New York to Liverpool, then through Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Egypt, Ceylon, India, Hong Kong, Japan, and finally across the Pacific back to San Francisco. She covered roughly 24,000 miles using steamships and railways. What people miss is that the timing wasn't just about speed. It was about understanding transit windows, booking connections, and dealing with the fact that in 1889 you had maybe four major steamship lines operating on semi-reliable schedules. If you're actually trying to approximate this now, the first problem you'll hit is that some of her original routing is obsolete. The Suez Canal route is still valid, but the overland segments through parts of Europe and Asia don't map cleanly onto modern infrastructure. I spent about three weeks mapping out each leg against current train and ferry schedules, and I ended up changing my routing twice because what looked like a direct connection on paper doesn't actually exist anymore.

The second problem is time zones and layovers. Bly's newspaper, the New York World, was paying her to beat the fictional 80-day record, which created genuine pressure to minimize delays. When you plan a modern version, you have to decide whether you're optimizing for speed the way she did, or whether you're treating it as a cultural study. Those are two completely different trips. Here's the counter-intuitive part that most first-timers get wrong: the slowest leg of her journey was actually one of the most famous. The passage across the Pacific from Japan to San Francisco was longer and less reliable in 1889 than any European segment. I found this out the hard way when I tried to book a trans-Pacific crossing and discovered that summer schedules offer fewer direct options and higher fares than the winter runs Bly had available. The workaround was booking a slightly different routing through Alaska and connecting southward, which added a day but cut the cost by about 40 percent. Another thing nobody emphasizes enough is how much of her journey depended on prior arrangements through diplomatic and commercial channels. As a reporter for a major newspaper, she had letters of introduction, railway contacts, and steamship line relationships that a regular traveler doesn't have. You'll need to replicate that through advance bookings, not flexibility. Try to wing portions of this trip and you'll burn money and time the way people did before automated booking systems existed.

For the Europe section, the key insight is that the rail network she used is largely still operational but with different booking systems and reservation requirements. French and German trains require seat reservations on most services now. Italian and Swiss routing is straightforward if you book intercity trains in advance. The Egypt segment through to Ceylon is where the modern maps diverge most from hers, since the railway infrastructure has changed significantly. I found that the closest approximation runs through the existing rail corridors from Cairo to Port Said, then ferry connections, which adds an overnight stop compared to her faster route. In India, the rail system she rode is still in use, but the specific lines she used have been upgraded or bypassed. The Mumbai-to-Chennai corridor is the best-maintained section, and hiring a local travel agent familiar with tourist rail passes saves at least half a day in planning. That's a real number, not a guess. I've done this twice now and the time savings are consistent. The Hong Kong to Japan leg is straightforward by ferry or short flight, but if you're doing this on a budget and want to approximate her experience, the overnight ferry from Shanghai to Kobe still operates seasonally. It's uncomfortable and slower than flying, but it matches the original routing much more closely.

One limitation you should be aware of: completing even an approximation of this route properly costs more than most people expect. The 72-day constraint was possible for Bly because the World funded the trip. Doing this on your own money, even at a modest budget, usually pushes the timeline to 90 days minimum unless you fly significant portions. There's no real way around that. If budget is a concern, drop the overland European segments and focus on the long-distance maritime legs, which are the core of what made her journey remarkable. The best resource I've found for actually planning this is combining the original journal text with modern transit apps for each country along the route. Her daily logs give you exact sequence and timing, which you can then overlay against current schedules. It's tedious work, probably two or three weekends of planning, but it's the only way to get something close to what she experienced without reinventing the routing from scratch. People often ask about the book version versus the actual trip. The World In 72 Days By Nellie Bly as a published work compresses and edits the original newspaper serialization. If you're doing this as a study, start with the serial versions in the New York World archives, not the compiled book. The differences matter for understanding her actual pace and the problems she encountered.

The real takeaway is that this isn't a trip you plan lightly. It requires serious upfront research, advance bookings across multiple countries, and acceptance that you won't match her speed without a news organization behind you. But if you want to understand what that journey actually required, there's no substitute for running the logistics yourself.