Men's Journal November 2004: The World on Two Wheels

Ewan McGregor and 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 relieve their epic journey from London to New York- in an exclusive excerpt from their amazing account, Long Way Round.

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 konw 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 vike, 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 presuaded my parents to let me buy amotorbike, a Yamaha 100 that I've kept to this day. I bought it with my earnings as a feature 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 blond 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 teh 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 wok on Star Wars 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 phototgrapher friend, let 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 80mph. 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 campaing to get the Ducati importing it from Italy thorugh James Wilson, a friend of Charley's who rat 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 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, the 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 waht 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 happend 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 ridding 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 hte 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 very 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 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 American. London to New York- the Long Way Round. On Wednesday April 14, 2004, shortly after 9am, we set off. Ahead of us three continents stretched eastward. All of them would hae 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.

Charley: We had been on the road for a few weeks, riding from London to France, through the Czech Republick and Ukraine. I could feel my stomach wobbling a bit about the roads in Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Siberia. For me, those three words were at the heart of the experience, and we'd only be able to relax again when they were behind us.We reached the town of Aralsk, unitl recently on the shores of the Aral Sea, and rode down to where the waterfront had been. What was once the world's fourth-largest expanse of inland water was nowhere to be seen. Since the 1960' s when the Soviet government redirected the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers to irrigate cotton fields, the Aral Sea had been in reatreat Without its main water sources, the sea's level had fallen by about 50 feet, and the Aral Sea had split into two much smaller lakes containing water that was now three times saltier than it was 50 years ago. Once abundant stocks of sturgeon, roach, carp, and other fish had died out. Aralsk had once been a thriving seaport supporting shipping and fishing industries. Now it was a desolate inland town. The only sign of its maritime heritage was a line of rusting fishing boats lying like beached whales on the sand, the sea now out of sight, over the horizon. We pressed on without pausing for lunch. A short distance beyond Aralsk the mud finally ended, and we were riding on tarmac for teh first time in three days. I was so pleased I got off my bike, lay down on the road, and kissed the surface. We took full advantage of the better conditions, putting as many miles as we could under our wheels as the temperature plummeted and a downpour made the surface of the dusty roads as slippery as an ice rink. Thirty-five miles from Qyzylorda, the yellow low-fuel light flashed on my instrument panel. We rode on praying our fuel would last, thinking we would be stranded in the cold and the dark, waiting for gas while the rain pissed down on us. Half an hour later Ewan and I were standing in the foyer of a hotel. We'd just made it. "I hit the wall out there," Ewan admitted. "I couldn't ride another mile." We'd put nearly 400 miles behind us and we were both physically and emotionally drained.

Ewan: The sun burst into my bedroom, waking me up. I drew the curtains. It was a cool, crisp morning; it was clearly going to be a beautiful day. I immediately felt much better than the previous night. We had 400 miles ahead of us and I couldn't wait to get back on my bike. Soon we were back on a tarmac road, floating along at 80 mph. The landscape changed. It was still quite flat, but the desert gave way to more fertile plains, dotted with lines of cypress trees. It was at times like this that I was glad to be alive. Good roads, good weather, good bike, goodbye. We passed a sigin; 1,000 kilometers to Almaty. After what we'd been through, it seemed a pitance. Two days easy riding. I put some Beatles on in my iPod and rode along listening to the music. When "The Long and Winding Road" came on I couldn't help but think of my wife and children and sing along to the tune. Blasting out "The long and winding road/ That leads to your door..." inside my helmet. I felt fantastic. We stopped in the town of Turkestan on the edge of the Kyzyl Kum desert to visit Kazakhstan's most important historic building, a turquoisedomed mausoleum dedicated to Hodja Ahmed Yasevi, an early Turkic Muslim holy man. It was most beautiful, tranquil building inside and out. The main dome of brick is the largest of its kind in Central Asia, and has a frieze of original tiles that date to the 14th century. Chatting to a young woman who showed us around, I realized I was no longer thinking of the trip as a journey between London and New York. I wasn't even thinking of it as a trip across Kazakhstan. I was living for the day, riding along, watching the world pass by and meeting people along the road. To have forgotten about the whole trip and to live in the here and now was a tremendous liberation.

Russia to Mongolia

Ewan: I loved Kazakhstand and I was sad to leave. Strangers had welcomed us into their homes, and everyone we had met had been remarkably hospitable. Three hellish days on the road of death and the other days spent riding vast distances across almost empty landscapes had banished my fears about what lay ahead and embedded us in the journey. We were covering huge distances. Four hundred and seventy miles that day. Another 300 miles ahead of us the next day. Just riding from morning to evening. And as we followed the road, I came to feel that I belonged on that big motorcycle, rolling around the world. It was meant to be. And it didn't matter where exactly we were headed. We'd get there. We'd find somewhere to stay. Something or somebody would turn up. And if they didn't we'd camp. It was that simple. At last I was living for each day, free as the eagles that lined the roadside, and I had the land of caviar, oil, and gold to thank for that. Charley was very quiet as we made our way to Gorno-Altaysk, riding at the back. "I just feel things are not going my way, and I need some time," he said, but it may have been the argument we'd had leaving town, when I had insisted on leading and had gotten lost. Charley had a tendency to always want to lead. I was happy with it most of the time, but there were times when I had enough of traipsing along at the back. "I don't want to spend this trip being led around the world," I said. But it seemed that whenever I took over we'd get lost, and then immediately Charley would go into a gas station to get directions and take over the lead, without giving me a chance to sort things out for myself. The riding, however was glorious: across hot plains and through cool pine forests.

Everything felt as if it had slotted into place. We arrived at Gorno-Altaysk in the late afternoon and spent the night in a four-story dacha. It looked like an Alpine chalet and apparently once housed the secret police. We had little idea of where we were or who we were staying with, but it was something I had grown to love: just turning up, being told where to park our bikes and shown where to sleep. No prior arrangements and no fuss. We rode higher into the mountains the next day, the twisty road climbing through thicks forests and lush fields, and winding along meandering streams through mountain valleys carpeted with pink-purple heather. We'd always dismissed this part of the journey when we had been planning the route, but it was the best day's riding I'd ever had. "We'll just nip through a bit of Russia between Kazakhstand and Mongolia," we had said, not expecting the Altay mountains to be a scenic highlight of the trip. I was in paradise, marveling at how the landscape changed at every ben. It was staggeringly beautiful, with little wooden settlements beside rivers. Children and old ladies were collecting water in buckets from the river and carrying it home to irrigate their gardens, and lumberjacks were felling trees. Like the previoius day it was stiflingly hot. Even though I was wearing nothing under my jacket and trousers, rivulets of sweat were pouring down my back. Spotting a moutain stream, we stopped, stripped off, and went skinney-dipping. "Aaagh! Where has my penis gone?" I screamed as I stepped into the river and my body recoliled from the cold. Only just above freezing, the water came from melted snow a few hundred meters higher. "I'm not going in there,: Charley shouted from the bank. "It's too f**king cold." I managed to lie down and slip completely beneath the water, washing off half a day's sweat.

"Aaaaagh! My feet are so cold! Complete penis disappearance!" I shouted. Eventually, Charley summoned up the courage. Stepping gingerly across the stones, he suddenly ducked under the water and shot back up, yelling at the cold. "This is so liberating!" I screamed, running naked along the river bank back to my bike. "Nude men in the countryside! We should have some drums and bows and arrows." The best part of the impromptu skinny-dip was that we had shaken off our obsession with keepign to the schedule. We wouldn't have stopped at that river a week or so earlier, when there was an overiding feeling that we had to keep going, come what may. But we'd come to realize that keeping to a planned mileage was pointless if we didn't experience anything along the way. We were three and a half days behind schedule, but it didn't matter anymore. The days were merging into one another. The experiences felt deeper and just as intense, but less pointed. I was taking fewer photographs and talking less about what we had seen and done each day, because I no longer felt like a tourist or a traveler. The journey had become my life. By late afternoon, realizing that because of the winding roads we would not make it to the Mongolian border before it closed at seven o'clock, we stopped to camp beside another river. I got my fishing rod out for the first time. I cast a few lines but caught nothing. Then we ate together, sitting at the huge campfire, gazing into the flames, telling ghost stories and chatting until one in the morning, taking turns singing songs beneath the starry sky. We continued climbing the next day, up mountain passes with snowcapped peaks. We creasted a hill to see the road stretching out in front of us straight as a die, the vast expanse split by a narrow tarmac ribbon running down the hill, across the valley floor, and back up the opposite hill, not a kink in the road for as far as we could see. The riding was beautiful, but after the late night around the fire the monotony of that long, straight road made it difficult to stay awake. By the time we reached the border I was desperate for sleep, and I crumpled into a heap on the concrete floor. Two hours later we were in no man's land. Behind us, the Russian border, all brand new gleaming concrete and steel buildings. As we rode down a hill toward a string of shabby wooden huts that looked as if they hadn't been painted for 50 years, the tarmac ran out under our wheels and the gravel began. Ahead of us stretched the Mongolian border, a frontier we'd been repeatedly told was not open to Westerners.

This crossing was strictly for local Russian and Mongolian goods vehicles, and it certainly looked as though it were rarely used. But we'd received special permission to enter Mongolia from the west and make our way to Ulaanbaatar, in the east of the country, along a route rarely travled by tourists. We rode into Mongolia, turned a corner, and ran straight into a herd of yaks. Fifteeen or 20 of the big hairy monsters. We pulled into a clearing, where our local fixer, Karina, had been waiting for four days. She was very excited to see us and tied blue ribbons to our bikes, a Mongolian shaman tradition used to bestow good luck on babies and behicles. As soon as we'd had a cup of tea, we whipped off. Within minutes Charley was on the radio. "Hell, look at these roads," he said. "This is like going back to the stone age. What have we let ourselves in for?" "Sand would be preferable to this loose gravel, I said. "I'd even take mud," Charley replied. "Some dried mud would be nice, but this rocky gravelly stuff is a nightmare." The roads were atrocioius. They were no more than tracks made by nomads' trucks and animals. As we rode in parallel across sludge-colored plains, an immense sky threw shadows in a million shades of brown across the rolling hills and mountains. and five or six tracks cut across the steppe, making it difficult to judge which one went where. I'd hoped we'd be able to make up lost time in Mongolia, but even our target of 100 miles a day would test us- and our bikes.

Alaska

Ewan: Arriving in Alaska was a complete shock. I'd expected Anchorage to be a romantic, rustic outback town, with a row of wooden buildings along one main street and a spit and sawdust port. Instead it was just like any other American city, with shopping malls, big buildings on a grid of streets, and traffic lights at every corner. We'd been in untamed lands for such a long time, places where people had nothing but were filled with hospitality and warmth,that it felt strange to be back somewhere where everything was on offer. Having spent two and a half months reveling in the liberation from the most excessive aspects of Western consumerism, one of the first things we did on arrival in Anchorage was succumb immediately to an American breakfast. Charley had stuffed French toast and I had eggs Benedict, with side orders of crispy bacon, lots of orange juice, and strong coffee. “I'm not even hungry,: Charley said, tucking into his breakfast with relish.

Calgary:

Ewan: It was early afternoon as we approached Calgary with a good lunch in our bellies. Two days previous we'd stopped wearing protective clothing. It was too hot. Wearing jeans, T-shirts, and leather or canvas jackets, we were riding up toward the brow of a hill when the traffic ahead of us slowed suddenly. Charley put his hazard lights on. Riding at about 60 miles an hour, I reached forward to put my hazard lights on. There was a screech of tires and then the bike went completely out of control. It happened so fast, I don't know which came first. Charley said afterward that he saw it all in his wing mirrors. “Out of nowhere, a red car just whammed into the back of you,” he said afterward. “Your front wheel went straight up in the air, almost vertical, then slammed down on the road. Your handlebars were weaving from right to left to right to left. Somehow you managed to stay on and came to a stop. “ All I could remember was a bang, suddenly being out of control, seeing a big grass ditch about six feet deep to my left, and thinking I was going to topple into it. I'm not going on the grass, I'm not going on the grass, I repeated to myself, and I managed to pull the bike around. The next thing I noticed was that my bike was still running after being smashed in the tail end, that I was still on it, and that it was riding straight and true. I pulled off to the side of the highway, put my bike on it's stand, and got off unharmed, unscathed. I didn't even have a stiff neck. This bike is amazing, I thought. I've just been hit from behind and I managed to ride in a straight line. It could have been very nasty, but I came away without a scratch. A kid, about 17 years old, dressed in baggy pants with a chain wallet, got out of a red Honda Civic. The poor kid was in a bit of a state, and his car was wrecked. The hood was crumpled. The front grill and the mud guard were lying on the ground. I wasn't angry, but I felt as if I should be. “What were you doing with your eyes?” I said. “I didn't see you man,” he replied. Charley was furious. “You almost killed my friend!” he screamed. Charley looked ready to beat up the kid, but I was just pleased to be alive. “It was just an accident, and accidents happen,” I said. “Are you all right? “ “Yeah, yeah. I'm all right, man,” the kid said. Then he turned around. “Oh, my f***king car's f**ed, man. My f**ing car's f**ed.” All I could think was that I was lucky to be alive, and he was worrying about his car! Meanwhile I was as high as a kite. The adrenaline was pumping, and I felt elated. We'd come through some of the most difficult road conditions in the world, and our first accident was someone rear-ending me on a Canadian highway.

New York:

On the evening of July 27th, we passed a signpost that said New York 166 miles. We tapped hotel into the GPS and were led to the Chestnut Oquaga Lake in upstate New York. It was a beautiful place, just the right setting for our last meal together. The next day we rode to Orange County Choppers, near the town of Montgomery, I'd become obsessed with watching the DVD of the first series of American Chopper, the show about the father-son team of Paul Teutul Sr. and Paul Jr. building custom bikes and arguing like hell. The two Paul's were incredibly friendly and showed us around the workshop. I got our world map out and showed them where we'd been. They were very interested, and then they said what I'd been really hoping for: “Let's go for a ride.” They game me a chopper about 12 feet long and on which my backside was practically lower than the top of the rear wheel. It was ridiculous, but if felt so good. I wheeled it back -you needed to pick your spot if you wanted to do a U turn - and not realizing it had a big mudguard at the back, I dinged it into the wall. Paul Jr. was standing next to me. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said. I was mortified. The bikes were worth around $70,000. Fortunately, I hadn't taken a little chip out of the beautiful paint job. Charley was such a sports bike rider that I hadn't expected him to be particularly excited by the experience, but when I looked over at him on another chopper I could see he was absolutely thrilled. Sitting on two enormously long bikes, we fired them up and were blown away by the roar of the engines. With a mixture of a heavy heart and extreme excitement, we moved off for the very last time. Destination: Manhattan. Riding down the ramp onto the bridge, Charley and I stood up on our pegs, and the glorious Manhattan skyline suddenly appeared on our right, stretching down the Hudson River. A Helicopter was flying level with us over the water, a cameraman hanging out of its door, and I was gone. I burst into tears crying like a baby, the tears rolling down my face as I blubbed into my helmet and pulled a V for victory sign to the helicopter swooping nearby. All the way across the bridge and halfway down the West Side Highway, the tears kept flowing. “We did it!” I shouted to Charley. “We wanted to do it. We said we'd do it We f**king did it!”