Most people don’t start the Ewan McGregor & Charley Boorman machine with Long Way Down. It’s a sequel to their 2004 motorcycle adventure around the world, Long Way Round, where they rode from London to New York via Siberia and Mongola. That was a big deal and a big adventure and I don’t think Long Way Down ever quite recaptured the magic.
All the same, it was the first one I saw. Another motorbike journey, this time from John O’Groats to Cape Town via East Africa. The background is that Ewan & Charley wanted to do an adventure and found the best – maybe the only – way to fund it was to persuade a TV production company to film it. That and getting various other companies to sponsor it. For example, the motorbikes they used were given to them by BMW, and that was where the first bad taste in my mouth came in. The first plan was to approach KTM, a brand of bright orange off-road and adventure bikes. They decided the trip through Siberia was probably not going to go well and it wouldn’t look good for their bikes so they declined the offer to hand over free bikes, at which point Charley Boorman threw an absolute lying-on-the-floor screaming-and-thrashing tantrum.
Yes, we can’t go much further without addressing Charley. Charley Boorman is the son of director John Boorman; he’s made appearances in some of his father’s films and he thinks he’s a much bigger movie star than he really is. He’s an entitled spoiled brat and he’s by far the worst thing about these adventures. Ewan McGregor genuinely is a big film star but he comes across as much less up himself and much more likeable.
With the TV show came the inevitable tie-in book. It feels like it’s made up of Ewan & Charley’s diaries from the road but it’s pretty obvious they were not keeping diaries as they went along. These should be great books, full of adventure and marvel and adrenaline and discoveries and… they’re not. At least Long Way Down isn’t. It’s been a long time since I’ve re-read Long Way Round.
The problem with Long Way Down is mostly that no one gets along together and there are spats and squabbles and fallings-out all the way to at least Egypt. There’s an entire support crew on the road plus another one back at home in the production office keeping this whole thing going so two men can ride motorbikes a long way and the only role they appear to be playing in the book “and there was big tension in the group and we wanted to ride off without them”. Two of them are refused visas to Libya, forcing them to fly to Geneva and then back to Cairo, missing a huge chunk of the journey and Ewan & Charley can barely manage a shrug of disinterest in the problem. They know there’s a lot of paperwork involved in taking this much equipment and this many vehicles across international borders – surely they got this well and truly drummed into them on Long Way Round? – and yet within the first fortnight, Charley’s lost his motorbike paperwork. Who trusted Charley Boorman with important documents in the first place?
Then there’s the schedule. They fight over the schedule non-stop for the entire duration of Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. They have to get to Aswan for Saturday to catch the ferry to Sudan, otherwise they’ll have to wait a week and miss a charity profile-raising visit. They spend the entire duration of three countries complaining constantly about how they hate having to rush through countries vs how much they don’t want to miss the ferry. No one at any point offers anything resembling a solution, no one at any point mentions that this is annoying but unavoidable, they just whinge and moan about it as if they’re expecting a solution to pop out of mid-air. Maybe they think if they go on about it enough, the ferry company will psychically detect it and spontaneously give them a call to say they’re holding the boat until Wednesday. This complaining occupies well over a quarter of the book and it gets really annoying really quickly.
And then there’s relatively little interest in Africa. It’s all about the riding and the arguments. Ewan & Charley manage some interest in the Great Pyramids and Leptis Magna but the temples at Abu Simbel get less than two sentences and the visit to the confluences of the Blue and White Niles is pretty much confined to the difficulties in getting into the Hilton Khartoun to stand on the roof while a visiting head of state is there. It’s all about how hard/exhilarating/tiring/hot the riding is and how Ewan & motorbike cameraman Claudio keep crashing the bikes because they’re not very good at riding off-road.
There are a few good and detailed events in the charity visits. They’re riding for UNICEF – at least, they’re wearing UNICEF t-shirts and making regular comments about how good they are, which they are. But they make stops at CHAS, Children’s Hospices Across Scotland and you get to hear a lot about what they do and the stories of the children and families who benefit from the hospices. They visit Riders for Health in Kenya, who use motorbikes to deliver relatively basic healthcare to people who aren’t in reach of services like that and you get to hear a lot about what they do and the differences they’ve made in remote communities. They visit a UNICEF landmine education project in northern Ethiopia, on the Eritrean border and again, you get to see what they do and meet people affected. They visit a UNICEF IDP camp in Uganda and you get to meet the child soldiers now rebuilding their lives. Those visits are some of the best parts of the book, not because of the worthiness of them, but because they’re some of the few places where Ewan & Charley seem to care much about anything other than riding a motorbike. They cover the whole of Sudan in two pages about how hot and dry it is, Libya is an endless chapter about the dark and the sandstorm and very little else, the boat trip from Aswan to Sudan is virtually glossed over. But here you get to experience things with them at last.
I guess part of the problem with the book is that there’s no real incentive for them to write it. The TV series is mostly just filming their exploits (although how much filming of the two stars they can do when most of the cameramen are in the support car up to an entire day behind the bikes). It’s a travel vlog, really, before vlogging was a thing, and that’s going to give a good amount of what’s going on and what they think and feel. But the book is another matter. It’s not going to fund their motorbike trip because that’s already finished when they write the book. I don’t think either of them are particularly engaging storytellers and I think it suffers from the absence of the rest of the team. And I don’t like Charley.
But mostly an adventure on this scale could have been a really big book and in order to cut it down to an acceptable-sized book, they’ve had to miss out or skim over so much stuff. And yet they kept in the interminable complaining about the schedule and about each other.
Travel Library opinion: you won’t hear me say this often. The TV show is much better.