Long Way Round

I finally got the DVDs for Long Way Round, Ewan MacGregor and Charley Boorman’s 2004 round the world motorcycle trip. They had filmed it and turned it into a show, which apparently aired on Bravo but I never saw it. I had to order the DVDs from amazon.ca because I wasn’t finding them still available in the US for some reason (at least not the special edition with 10 episodes, as opposed to the original 7). The whole series was fantastic. I would recommend watching it even if you’re not particularly interested in motorcycles. Just the whole traveling into remote parts of the world and meeting the people there angle is really interesting. They had a cameraman, Claudio von Planta, on a third motorcycle with them, and two support vehicles traveling a few days behind them to meet up at borders and help with the documentation needed there for crossings. The roads for probably 2/3 of their trip were pretty much non-existent so you get to see some pretty rough off-roading as well.

They actually ran into Ted Simon in Mongolia – he’s the author of Jupiter’s Travels, about his riding round the world for 4 years on a Triumph back in the 1970s. They worked with UNICEF for the trip and met up with children in different cities to spread awareness of UNICEF’s cause. My favorite parts were when they stayed with Igor in Ukraine (episode 3) and when they traveled the Road of Bones in Siberia (episode 7).

Last year they did another trip, Long Way Down, where they traveled from the tip of Scotland to the tip of South Africa. I’ll probably pick up that DVD set soon to check out.

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