Any trip is good, but any bike trip is better . . . this more or less sums up why actors and friends Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman took the long way from London to New York. Kieran Fagan reports
Actors and motor bike enthusiasts Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman travelled through Europe, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Russia, then across the Bering Strait by plane to Canada and the US.
Beginning in London in April 2004, the two friends rode their big BMW touring bikes more than 20,000 miles in under four months. A cameraman travelled with them filming for a TV series.
In the Czech republic McGregor listened to Wagner on his iPod as they rode through towns on their way to visit All Saints' Chapel at Sedlec. It was decorated with "what looked like Christmas decorations . . . images on walls, inscriptions all made from human bones. Skulls and jawbones, and teeth and fingers and hips and shoulder blades and lots of femurs - gruesome, chilling and quite beautiful."
Border guards were obstructive in the Ukraine. But the city of Lviv was worth it - big squares, classical buildings, cobbled streets, old men playing chess. Everywhere they were warned about the perils ahead.
In the Ukraine they said Russia was dangerous. In Russia people shook their heads about Kazakhstan. The Kazakhs said Mongolia was trouble. And everybody, everywhere, said the same thing about Siberia. Don't go there.
At the Russian border, a guard mimed a "wheelie" and invited Charley to do one across the frontier. The barrier went up and Charley shot across at 40 mph with his front wheel three feet in the air. The guard went berserk and called him back. Charley froze. "Do again," the guard smiled . He wanted to take another picture.
There were worse moments. Exhaustion, injury, accidents dogged their travels. In Kazakhstan the roads were badly messed up.
Mongolia stood out, says Charley. "The most different, the most beautiful, the loveliest people, the most remote, no roads just dirt tracks. We stopped and a kid rode up on a horse, he stared at us - he looked so weird. How weird did we look to him? Then he just smiled at us. That was an astonishing moment."
So also was the Road of Bones in Siberia. That's another story.
Then again, it was to hear these tales that 500 bikers gathered a few weeks ago in north Dublin. In the glass palace of Joe Duffy Motors showroom at the M50 Finglas interchange on the outskirts of Dublin, Boorman came to relive the trip.
There's something about the way bikers walk. They shuffle like they had a hinge at the base of the spine. One foot swings out and circles forward, then the other. Maybe a lifetime crouching over shiny fuel tanks does it. Maybe it has something to do with wearing a loomful of semi-rigid Goretex when the rest of the world strides out in Levis.
This is a broad church, and the two-wheeled faithful have taken off their everyday disguises. They may look like people we know, like lawyers and accountants, secretaries and science teachers, cops and couriers. That woman there, she looks like Susie Hall, teacher and then president of Asti, the secondary teachers' union. But it isn't. That's the real Susie Hall, biker.
Boorman shows a video with clips of the trip. Mongolia is astonishing.
He learnt his biking from Tommy Rochford, in Annamoe. Wicklow motocross prepares you for almost anything - except they don't expect visitors to eat bull's testicles in Rocky Valley as do the nomads at Uvs lake.
Rochford beams at the mention of his treasured Italian Maico 500. Boorman was brought up in Co Wicklow - his father is film director John Boorman (Excalibur, The General, Deliverance, and The Emerald Forest - in which his son starred).
A guy in the audience asks the saddest question of all. "How can you get away from home for three and a half months when I'm in trouble over going for a two-hour spin?"
Everyone knows the answer to that. Marry someone else. Boorman tells us how supportive his wife Olly is, and that she knew from the outset that he was a passionate biker, and how much he missed her and his daughters, Kinvara and Doone. He phoned home every day. "You get sentimental on the road. I'd see a horse with its foal and a tear would come to my eye."
So what went wrong with the BMWs? Nothing, he said. "They were superb." Mind you in the beginning he thought he preferred KTMs, made by a small Austrian firm specialising in off-road and endurance bikes. "KTM is the Rolling Stones," he'd said. "Anything else is 'Take That'." KTM had been supportive, but pulled out. They'd settled on the BMW R1150GS, a big hunk of a road bike and McGregor's first choice.
But the problem? Claudio the cameraman, not an experienced biker, came off his BMW on rough terrain in Mongolia, damaged a sub-frame, and local welding made things worse. They had to buy a second-hand bike locally. Overall the BMWs performed magnificently. Boorman hopes to take one on the Paris-Dakar rally.
The most important thing to bring on a long bike trip? "Baby wipes - hundreds." (There are hazards to sitting on a bike all day . . . )
So it's not over. No hanging up the leathers yet? "No chance. Any trip is good. Any bike trip is better!".
Nobody in the audience - listening as respectfully as members of the Royal Geographic Society heard Scott or Shackleton on returning from the Antarctic - could have put it better.
Long Way Round - Chasing Shadows Across the World, by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman, with Robert Uhlig: Timewarner Books.
A DVD of the TV series is also available on the Virgin label.