The World on Two Wheels
Ewan McGregor & Charley Boorman dreamed up the ultimate road trip: a circumnavigation of the globe by motorcycle. More than 20,000 miles and three and a half months later, two longtime friends relive their epic journey from London to New York -- in an exclusive excerpt from their amazing account, Long Way Round
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[ IN THE BEGINNING ]
Ewan: Every journey begins with a single step. in our case it was eight years ago, when Charley walked straight up to me in Casey's, a pub that was more like someone's living room than a bar, at Sixmilebridge in County Clare in Ireland. Except for an eager and winning smile, there was nothing in the way of an introduction.
"You ride bikes," he said.
"Yeah," I replied hesitantly, taken aback by the gregarious, long-haired stranger in front of me.
It was the kickoff party on the eve of the first day's shooting of
The Serpent's Kiss, and although Charley and I didn't know it yet, we had a lot in common. We were both married with daughters only a few months old, we'd both been working actors for some time, and we were facing weeks of working close together. There was a lot we could have talked about, but Charley has an instinct for cutting through social niceties straight to the subject closest to a person's heart.
"Yeah...yeah, I ride a '78 Moto Guzzi," I said, referring to my first big bike, a heavy Italian machine built like a tractor. And with that we were away. The evening dissolved into a long night of biker anecdotes and bonding over tales of fatherhood.
Charley: I've been obsessed with bikes for as long as I can remember. Growing up on a farm in County Wicklow, there was a guy up the road who had a bike, and I always saw him bombing past. I was about six years old, and I just thought,
Wow.
Around that time my father, John Boorman, was directing
Zardoz in Ireland with Sean Connery, who was staying at our house during the shoot. One weekend Sean's son Jason came to visit. Jason was quite a bit older than me and spent most of his stay forcing me to push him up and down the drive on a little Monkey Bike. Eventually, long after I had got the bike started and Jason had spent a long time riding it around the farm, he let me have a go. I promptly fell off, but that one moment -- that twist of the grip, the roar of the engine, the smell of the exhaust and the petrol, and the thrill of the speed -- was enough. I was hooked.
Before long I'd persuaded my parents to let me buy a motorbike, a Yamaha 100 that I've kept to this day. I bought it with my earnings as a featured extra in
The Great Train Robbery. It was fabulous.
Ewan: It was my first girlfriend who got me into bikes -- in a roundabout way. She was petite, with short mousy blonde hair and a smile that was as wicked as her character, and I was mad about her. Whereas I was a day pupil, she was a boarder at Morrison's Academy, our school in Crieff, a small Perthshire town. She and I went out for a while when I was about 13 or 14. Her personality was a beguiling mix of contradictions, and maybe that was why I couldn't stop thinking about her. She was very sweet-natured, but at times she could be really hardcore, quite a tough cookie. Her right breast was the first girl's breast that I ever touched. In a bush off Drummond Terrace.
Then she went off me. We were on, we were off; we were on, we were off. Our on-off romance came to an abrupt end, however, when she started going out with a guy from Ardvreck, the other school in Crieff. He rode a 50cc road bike first, then a 125. And whereas I had always walked her back to Ogilvy House, where she boarded, and snogged her at the gate, suddenly she was going back with this guy. He would meet her at the back gate, snog her, and then go screeching around Ogilvy House on his motorbike all night long. It drove everyone to distraction. He was doing it for her. And I knew what he felt like. And I knew what it made her feel like.
Not long after I began work on
Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace, I met up with Charley and some of his biker mates. They were all on sports bikes, and Charley had one too. I could see how much fun they were, but it wasn't until Sasha Gustav, a Russian photographer friend, lent me his sports bike that I found out for myself. It was the first brand new bike I had ridden, and I was in for quite a shock. Going down Haverstock Hill in Hampstead, I pulled away gently from the lights and looked down at the speedometer to discover I was already doing 80 mph. Alarmed at the speed, I hit the brakes and stopped almost instantaneously. I was gobsmacked. Sports bikes excel at what they do in the most exhilarating way. I decided there and then to get a new bike and to make it a sports bike and decided on a brand new Ducati 748.
When the shooting started at Leavesden Studios, north of London in Hertfordshire, I embarked on an all-out campaign to get the Ducati, importing it from Italy through James Wilson, a friend of Charley's who ran Set Up Engineering, a racing suspension specialist in South London. Importing the Ducati from Europe made it slightly cheaper, but I had to pay cash. Every few weeks I would bowl into the
Star Wars accounts department at Leavesden to ask for an advance, taking out many thousands of pounds each time. It was a lot of cash to ask for against my wages, and it all had to be authorized. They were making
Star Wars, and all I was thinking about was this wonderful Ducati. One afternoon, I got a phone call from Rick McCallum, the producer and George Lucas's right-hand man. He wanted to speak to me about the bike.
"George and I want to know how much this bike is costing you," he said. I told him how much, thinking I was about to be castigated for bothering the production accountants.
"George and I would like to buy it for you," Rick said. I was stunned. For the next few years I rode around on what was George Lucas's bike, until I passed it on to Charley, who rides it to this day.
It was quite ironic that George Lucas bought me the Ducati. I'm usually forbidden by contract to ride a bike while shooting a movie. The only location where I was allowed to ride to work was Australia; I spent almost two years there on and off, shooting
Moulin Rouge, and the second and third
Star Wars episodes. When I first met with Baz Luhrmann, the director of
Moulin Rouge, I told him that if he wanted me to sign up for eight months to rehearse and shoot his film -- a much longer period than the three months a film usually takes -- then I had to be allowed to ride a bike.
"I act. I am with my wife and kids. And I ride motorbikes. That's it. That's all I do," I said. "If you don't let me ride a motorbike for eight months, it's like forbidding me to listen to music. It's that big a deal to me. I cannot stay off bikes for eight months." Somehow, in Australia, they got their insurers to okay it.
Midway through the eight-month shoot I rode off into the outback. I rode for several hours, camped, and after pitching my tent I just stayed there. I didn't do anything -- just sat in a field beside a tent for a day, keeping the fire going. I fell asleep and woke up at four in the morning, staring at the stars, lying in the grass next to the burnt-out fire. It was just what I needed.
When I leave work on a motorbike, pull on my helmet, and move off, it doesn't matter if I've had a good day or not. With no phone, no stereo, and no traffic to sit in for 40 minutes, contemplating what's happened during the day, I am concentrating so hard on what I'm doing and where I'm going, and making sure that no one is pulling out to kill me, by the time I get home my mind has been cleared of any troubles. There's something about riding a bike -- the concentration and the single-mindedness of it, and the desire to get it right, taking a corner fast without losing control, doing it beautifully, getting into a groove and winning the battle between your head telling you to do one thing, the bike wanting to do another, and your body in between -- that I miss like hell if I don't get to ride every day.
Gradually a trip took shape in my head. I'd mentioned to Charley the idea of riding down to Spain with our wives, but it was something that we were going to do when the kids were older. I wanted to do something sooner. Much sooner. One Saturday afternoon I headed off to a map shop in Primrose Hill in London with Clara, my eldest daughter. I bought a very basic world map, spread it out on a pool table in my basement and indulged in a little daydreaming. My wife grew up in China, so I thought of riding there. Then I noticed that if I headed from Mongolia north into Siberia, instead of south to China, it wasn't that much farther east to the edge of Asia. Once there, it was only a relatively short leap across the Bering Strait to Alaska, and from Alaska, I reckoned, surely it would be hardtop all the way across North America. London to New York -- the long way round.
On Wednesday, April 14, 2004, shortly after 9 am, we set off. Ahead of us three continents stretched eastward. All of them would have to be crossed before we reached New York. With 20,000 miles, 107 days, and 19 time zones to go, we roared away -- two mates on the road together for the next three and a half months. It was a great feeling. Two big BMW R 1150 GS Adventures were purring beneath us, the first miles were under the wheels, and it felt great to be alive.
For the rest of Ewan and Charley's round-the-globe roadtrip pick up the November issue of Men's Journal.
