Ever wanted to walk in Phileas Fogg’s footsteps, circumnavigating the globe in 80 days? The hero of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days pulls it off using only boats and trains to get around.

Obviously today you could do it much faster going by plane (the current record is 32 hours, 49 minutes and 3 seconds, set by an Air France Concord in 1972), but what if you limited yourself to sea and rail travel?

According to the map pictured at right (click for larger version), these days you could quite easily circle the globe in just 42 days. It’d be a whirlwind trip, but sometimes there’s something to be said for speed. Of course the map, which comes from Very Small Array, is based on train timetables, and, as anyone who’s ever traveled long distance by train can attest, there’s a pretty good chance the trip would take considerably longer when you factor in the almost certain delays.

The route in this map would miss Africa and South America, but it also wouldn’t be nearly as expensive as you might think. Although the numbers are a couple of years out of date (2005), the map creators claim the total transportation bill would come to $5,312, which isn’t that bad for a once in a lifetime trip.

[found via Strange Maps]