Ramblin' Man

Later this month finds Charley Boorman taking to the stage at Vicar St. for an evening of chat and anecdotage about his various Long Way Down, Long Way Round, Race To Dakar and By Any Means... journeys, all of which have been chronicled in numerous TV shows and books. The trips have seen Boorman, the son of legendary film director John Boorman, undertaking long-distance journeys by pretty much any method except flight. Perhaps his most high-profile jaunts have been done in the company of friend and fellow bike enthusiast Ewan McGregor, whom he first met whilst working on a movie in the west of Ireland.

Their first trip, Long Way Round, was from London to New York via Europe and Asia. What moments stand out to Boorman now from this experience?
“I suppose Mongolia,” he reflects. “It was one of the really hard places to get across. The country is the same size as Europe, but it only has 400 miles of tarmac road. There are no sign posts, nothing, so when you’re on these dirt tracks you’re never quite sure where you’re going. We had same breakdowns and a lot of tough times to get through, but at the same time, it was one of the most beautiful countries we’d ever been to; the people and the landscape ticked all the boxes. Even in terms of difficulties and tough terrain, it was everything we wanted really.”
Was there ever any point where the duo felt they might not make it to their destination?
“Sure, there were lots of times when we sat there and thought, ‘Christ, how will we ever do this?’” admits Charley. “I remember once looking at Ewan, and we were going, ‘Whose idea was this?’ We both started laughing, because it was ours! We had no one else to blame but ourselves. But what we talk about in the TV show is that all those things that go wrong, they’re the things that you remember.
“You don’t remember so much the days where not much happened, but I do remember when we were going through Papua New Guinea on motorbikes, and we came around the corner and there was this roadblock, with five or six guys with big machetes demanding money off us. And then arguing with them because we didn’t want to pay (laughs).”
How did that particular encounter resolve itself?
“You’re going to have to come along and find out!” jokes Charley. “We managed to talk them out of it. We had this massive argument with them, and we eventually got through, someone turned to me and said, ’Charley, I’m glad we got away with that one!’”
In another show, Race To Dakar, Charley took part in the titular challenge, one of the toughest of its kind in the world (Boorman will be joined at Vicar Street by famous Dakar rally veteran Simon Pavey).
“Race To Dakar is a 13-day trek across the desert,” explains Charley. “It starts out with something like 260 bikes, 200 cars and 150 trucks all racing together. Only a third will finish, and most of the people who don’t make it to the end will have broken something. It’s a pure endurance test. You’re doing 800km every day; it’s a bit like riding off-road from London to Edinburgh on a daily basis. It was brutal – I fell off on day five and broke both of my hands. I then ended up riding another 450km with somebody to get to the doctor, because they’ve got like 56 doctors and nurses in helicopters.
“There’s 20 aircraft and they feed two-and-half thousand people every night. The whole tented village was the bivouac, where all the support vehicles are, and it moves 500km each day. I managed to get to the end of the day, and the doctor said, ‘I don’t thing you’re going any further.’ That was my journey over.”
As it happens, the day after our interview, John Boorman is due to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Dublin Film Festival. As a teenager, I was blown away by his masterpiece Deliverance, which over the years has numbered everyone from Stanley Kubrick to Quentin Tarantino amongst its fans. Charley himself, then just a young kid, appeared briefly in the movie.
“I remember my Dad saying, ‘If you sit on that sofa next to that guy, I’ll give you that tricycle’,” recalls Charley. “I was staring at that tricycle all day, going, ‘When I am fucking going to be able to ride that thing?’ But it was an amazing film. Before that, Dad had done Point Blank and Hell In The Pacific, two huge films. Especially Point Blank, it was probably one of the very first proper violent movies. It was the Tarantino film of its day. That’s probably my favourite one – I’m very proud.”