EWAN: On Wednesday 14 April, shortly after 9 a.m., we set off. Ahead of us, three continents stretched eastwards. All of them would have to be crossed before we reached New York. With 20,000 miles, 108 days and 19 time zones to go, we roared away from the workshop and offices in Bulwer Street, our friends, family and the team cheering behind us. Turning the corner, we drove out of their sight, advancing little more than a few tens of yards east before we came to our first stop: a BP petrol station. We needed to fill up. Then Charley dropped his bike. For the second time that morning.
We looked at each other. It was unusual for Charley ever to lose control of his bike but we both knew exactly what was running through each other’s minds. Had we chosen the wrong bikes? Were they too heavy? Had we overloaded them? And how the hell would we cope with them on the rough roads, swamps, marshes, and deserts of Asia when we couldn’t balance them on the flat tarmac of Shepherd’s Bush in west London? There was no getting away from it: the bikes were overloaded and heavy. But the explanation for Charley’s sudden weakness was rather less prosaic.
CHARLEY: After months of anticipation, at last the day of departure arrived and I was on the way to Bulwer Street with my wife, Olly, and my daughters, Kinvara and Doone. I felt excited and nervous, the children were more clingy than usual, but otherwise it was just like any other morning. With the four of us in the car, the girls giggling in the back, Olly and me chatting in the front, it was as if we were driving away from home for a runof-the-mill day out. Then, turning the corner into Bulwer Street, we were confronted by a scene of total chaos. People everywhere. And those who weren’t busy strapping things to cars were ticking items off checklists or carting heavy boxes out of the offices into the support vehicles, or milling around, waiting for us. I was consumed by nerves.
With much of the equipment, including the two Mitsubishi support vehicles, finalised only hours before we were due to leave, the crew had been working flat out for a week and had not slept for forty-eight hours. Ewan, of course, was ready and packed days earlier. There’s nothing he likes more than a chance to tidy up and put things away neatly, preferably clearly labelled for future reference. The night before departure, Ewan later told me with a degree of pleasure, he had gone to bed with his clothes for the morning carefully stacked—underpants and socks on the top of the pile—beside his meticulously packed bags. I, on the other hand, had left everything to the last moment. With Ewan looking on, I hastily bundled clothes, equipment and bike spares into my bags with such little regard for order and process that I could see Ewan was alarmed. So it was with some delight that I managed to pack all my things into a considerably smaller space and strap my bags to my bike with greater ease than he did. Nevertheless, our bikes topped the scales at almost a third of a ton fully laden with two side panniers, a top box containing communications and filming equipment specially designed for us by Sonic, a tank bag and a large holdall and tent strapped to the rear seat.
Pushing the bikes gingerly out into the street, we were petrified they would topple over when we propped them on their side stands. Olly and the children were watching, and my friend Roy, who runs the Bullet motorcycle shop and who had been a great help in the last few days of preparation, was there. My twin sister Daisy turned up with her boyfriend, Peter, waving a huge banner made from an old bedspread painted with the words ‘Charley and Ewan. Good Luck. Float Like Butterflies’. A wonderful, warm gesture. They also gave us crosses to accompany the St Christopher medals, trinkets and good-luck charms we were wearing around our necks. Peter, meanwhile, cruised through the crowd and workshop, his arms wide apart, booming: ‘The Time Has Come! The Time Has Come!’
Milling around in the street were some of Ewan’s friends and family, including his Uncle Denis. Olly made me a cup of coffee, but generally kept out of the way. The kids were dancing around me, coming up to hug me and asking questions, but I was too stressed to answer. It was the first time I’d felt any real nerves. Certainly, I’d had dark moments, waking up in the middle of the night, especially between Christmas and New Year, when the prospect of a television deal seemed remote. Worrying about whether I was doing the right thing going off for three months, leaving everybody behind, I was plagued with thoughts of what might happen if something went wrong. Any biker knows the rule of the road: one big fall and you’re toast. And, knowing I couldn’t really talk about such things with my wife, I felt completely alone with my demons. Ewan told me the same thoughts went through his head. He also had nights when he didn’t sleep. There were mornings when we would turn up at our workshop and we could see in each other’s tired, bloodshot eyes that we had both spent half the night thinking about the same thing.
Ewan described it as the longest goodbye. Day after day in the last fortnight of preparation, he would arrive at the workshop and unload tales of immense sadness at home. Particularly subdued one morning, he described how he had been dancing to the new Proclaimers album, whirling around the kitchen with Clara, his eldest daughter. ‘She really loved it,’ he said. ‘I had her in my arms. We were reeling away when I looked around to see Eve crying. It was terrible…there’s nothing to do in those circumstances but be sad.’ On other occasions, feeling his home was so brimming with unhappiness about his imminent departure, he couldn’t get out of the house fast enough. Whereas Olly was bored with four months’ preparation and just wanted us to get on with it, Ewan’s family was having a much tougher time coming to terms with his departure. Just days before we left he told me: ‘I feel so sick in my stomach, so sick I couldn’t stand it at home yesterday. It’s been unbelievably sad and horrible, that feeling where you just want to run away from it because it is just awful. I feel it all the time. I feel it with Eve. She is so unhappy and not herself. It’s not to make me guilty or anything like that. It’s just that she knows I’m leaving. I just want to run away from the pain.’
By the Monday before departure, with just two days to go, I, too, felt sick to my stomach. Pushing my fears and thoughts to the back of my mind, I told myself everything would be all right. I just got on with the job. There was no time for second thoughts.
Before we pushed the bikes outside, Russ and David arrived with Jo Melling, the project manager, carrying a sheaf of documents. Jo explained they were copies of all the visas, driving licences, passports and papers that we needed, but I saw red. ‘Just come and fucking give it to us at 8.15 in the morning, when we are trying to leave and we have to unpack everything just to get these things in,’ I shouted. ‘Why couldn’t you just fucking give us this fucking stuff yesterday or the day before yesterday instead of keeping it all upstairs for fucking hours and hours and hours?’ I was livid, but my anger soon gave way to guilt. Jo had worked tirelessly on all the visas and, while I had been asleep at home, she had toiled through the night to get everything ready. It was the first time in a long while that I had lost my temper. I gave Jo a hug, apologised and told her I felt stupid. But underneath I was still angry that, because I had to repack things, the bike was now even more top-heavy than before.
So when it came to saying our last goodbyes, I was shaking with nerves. Ewan had already said goodbye to Eve, his daughters and his mother at his home, riding away from them with tears streaming down his face. Fortunately my daughters, Doone and Kinvara, were fairly cool and reserved because we’d discussed it at home. I gave them a big hug and told them to look after their mum. Then I kissed Olly and squeezed her tight, holding my emotions in check until I swung my leg over the bike, at which point I overbalanced. Unable to support all that weight, I dropped the bike in front of thirty people. I looked over at Olly and I just knew what she was feeling. I could see the tears welling up in her eyes and I lost it. With the help of a few of the onlookers, I hoisted the bike back up and, gritting my teeth, rode away from my family and friends, deeply relieved that Ewan was in the front as we pulled off. I was so wobbly I couldn’t hold the bike. I couldn’t steer properly. I couldn’t drive the bike. I couldn’t do anything. Shepherd’s Bush Green dissolved in a flood of tears as I struggled to see through my visor. By the time we reached the petrol station, I had lost all my energy. The emotions involved in leaving my wife and children, and all the domestic hassles we’d had in the last few days, frantically trying to get things done before I left, welled up inside me. I dropped the bike again, smashing the indicator lamp. The bike would survive, but I had severely dented my pride.
With Roy, who had followed us to the petrol station on a waspy, backfiring little Italian bike, Ewan helped me pick up the bike. Struggling to pull myself together, I remembered the words of Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, a former SAS officer who had taught us how to survive in hostile environments: ‘If you can survive the prep, the mission will be fine.’ We had indeed survived the preparation, three months of it, but I still harboured a nagging doubt that we had chosen the wrong bike. I’d always favoured the lighter KTM over the BMW. And now it seemed I might have been right.
EWAN: From the moment we decided to ride around the world, Charley was convinced we should ride customised dirt bikes built by KTM, a small Austrian company that specialises in off-road enduro and motocross bikes. The only KTM he’d ever ridden was my KTM Duke, but Charley knew KTM’s enduro and motocross bikes had dominated the Paris–Dakar rally, the toughest of all off-road races, and won the enduro world championship for the last four years. In 2004, every rider in the top five rode a KTM bike, endorsement enough for any biker. But it was more than that. Among bikers, KTM has a much tougher hard-core image than better known, more mainstream bike manufacturers. Charley’s assessment was ‘KTM is the Rolling Stones. Anything else is Take That.’
Even before we began our bike assessment in early January, Charley had made his mind up. ‘I’ve always wanted the KTM,’ he said. ‘It’s built very differently. It’s much lighter and much thinner than other bikes. It answers all the requirements I would need for this trip. Plus it has that GF, that grin factor, about it. It’s more fun to ride. And I think that the people behind the scenes, the KTM guys, are much more fun and up for a bit of a laugh.’
But I needed more convincing, so early January found us outside the Abercrave Inn, near BMW’s off-road training facility in the Brecon Beacons in south Wales. It was a miserable, misty day. The ground was wet, but at least it wasn’t raining. A squad of BMW engineers and executives led us through the 1150 GS Adventure, their top-of-the-range endurance touring bike. Shaft driven and stacked with servo-booster ABS brakes, a huge 1150cc Boxer engine, heated grips, a 30-litre tank for a 200-mile range, and loads of gadgets, it was a massive, heavy machine.
While David and Russ held a meeting inside the oak-beamed pub with the BMW executives, Charley and I sped off for a couple of hours, first on local roads then off-road on BMW’s 2,100-acre test area. After the ride, even Charley had to concede he was surprised by the BMW. ‘They were a lot better than I thought they were going to be,’ he said. ‘I had a preconceived idea of what a BMW would be like and I was proved wrong. I’m man enough to admit that. But it’s still fucking heavy and there were times I struggled to bring the bike up when it dipped beneath me.’
I thought the BMW was a beautiful machine. Even though I dropped the bike when doing a slow U-turn on a dirt track, I was extremely impressed. But, most of all, I liked it because when we got back on the road it felt really sweet. I wanted to start back to London on it. I was surprised because BMWs come with a certain stigma about the people who ride them. But that had been blown away. It handled fantastically, I was really comfortable and I felt that this machine would go for ever. It was so solid and that slow revving engine just felt like it would get us around the world.
Two days later we were at KTM’s offices on a nondescript industrial estate in Milton Keynes. The windowless workshop might not have been as plush as the Abercrave Inn, or as imposing as several thousand acres of Welsh hills, but I could see from Charley’s face that for him this was oily biker heaven. From the moment we entered the whitewashed breeze-block building, Charley’s face bore a grin that reached from ear to ear. ‘Ooh, look at that,’ he exclaimed as soon as we walked in. Right in front of us stood two gleaming KTM bikes, a 640cc and the 950 Adventurer. From that moment on, as far as Charley was concerned BMW didn’t stand a chance.
We tested the 640 and 950 on KTM’s test ground, a scrappy area of concrete beside a disused airfield. With a few traffic cones dotted across the broken surface and some lengths of wood thrown on the ground, it couldn’t hold a candle to BMW’s facilities in Wales. No matter: the KTMs performed brilliantly, inspiring us with more confidence in our abilities than the BMWs had done. The choice was between the KTM 640, which was lighter and better suited to off-road biking, and the KTM 950 Adventurer, which would be hard work off-road but which would cruise happily at 90 or 100mph on the thousands of miles of hardtop across North America. The KTM mechanics warned us that the 950 Adventurer would not be as simple to service on the road as the 640 and pointed out that just about every Paris–Dakar rider used a 640, but our hearts were set on the bigger machine. The fuel tank on the 950 was a bit small, but we didn’t want to let that bother us. We were convinced we could find a way around its limited range.
By lunchtime, Charley was so enthused by the bikes he didn’t want to leave the test track. He wanted to have his lunch in the saddle. ‘It’s just fantastic, it’s everything that I thought it would be,’ he said. ‘And maybe a bit more.’ Eating with the KTM mechanics, we discussed the relative merits of the bikes and were set on KTM until Russ asked which bike we would choose if we had to set off immediately on a long journey.
‘When you ask that,’ I said, ‘and there’s the KTM sitting next to the BMW GS Adventure and I have to ride to Scotland right now and I’ve got both sets of keys, my immediate thought is that I’d go on the GS.’
Charley immediately cut in: ‘But it’s so…so…there’s no excitement in it. There’s no…it’s just nothing sitting on it. BMW, you know…it’s like their cars. I mean, they’re lovely cars but they’re boring to drive. You sit there and everything’s functional.’
‘Not the 325i I drove at Christmas. It wasn’t boring,’ I said.
‘Sure—but I don’t know…I just find it very clinical.’
‘You’re right. The BMW is practical, because they absolutely fucking do what they’re meant to do. Which is keep going for a very long time.’
David interjected: ‘You guys…’
But I couldn’t let it lie: ‘All right, here’s one other thing. A lot of the KTM guys we just met were slightly nervous about taking the bike around the world. Whereas the fucking BMW has been round the world for the last fifty years. That bike is proven.’
‘So what?’ said Charley. ‘We’re only doing twenty thousand miles. And any bike or car or any vehicle, you know it’s going to do it. You would do it on any vehicle you could buy these days. I mean, the guy was saying couriers are using these. He said couriers use these and they fucking love them.’
I was just exploring all the options, keeping an open mind. Charley might well be right, I thought, but it was too early to make a final decision.
David cut in again: ‘You know what it looks like? The KTM sits there in the drive and it looks like a supermodel. It’s, like, do you want to go out with Claudia Schiffer tonight? I mean, it’s the sexiest fucking bike on the planet.’
‘Or do you want to go out with the BMW,’ Charley added, warming to David’s theme, ‘which is one of the kitchen girls from the cooking programme.’
‘Absolutely. You know you’re going to get laid,’ David added, ‘so it’s…’
‘Two fat ladies or two supermodels,’ Charley chipped in.
‘Don’t get so worked up about it,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to prevent you going on the fucking KTM. It’s just that there are so many good points about the BMW too, that’s all. The KTM 950 is a sweet bike, but I still don’t get the feeling that it’s as robust as the BMW. I think BMW make a bike that goes round the world and I think they’re probably the only ones that do. If you think about it, it’s the only bike that is really designed and built to do what we want to do, but that’s not to say that we can’t make the KTM work for us. I think we can; I’m sure we can.’
‘I was just…,’ Charley started.
‘Listen, this is a fucking nice problem to have,’ I said. ‘This is a high-class dilemma. Okay? Which fantastic motorcycle will we choose? This is a top-league problem, baby. So let’s not lose sight of that.’
The next week we visited Honda. From the moment we stepped into their enormous factory hall, lined with just about everything Honda produces, from trucks and cars to bikes and lawnmowers, we knew Honda wasn’t right for us. Honda makes some great bikes. Its Africa Twin is an endurance classic and its Varadero had been recommended to us, but we felt neither could match KTM for sex appeal or the BMW for ruggedness. After a test ride through the streets of Swindon and along the M4, we left Honda for a pub lunch, where we discussed the events of the morning. At last we agreed on something: Honda was too corporate and its bike was not what we were looking for.
‘I think there’s only one bike that’s built for this,’ I said.
‘And that’s the KTM,’ Charley cut in.
‘Now listen, listen, listen. In terms of a bike that’s built for this trip, there’s only the one that we’ve ridden so far…’
‘And which one’s that?’ Charley demanded.
‘The Beamer.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘It’s built for this kind of trip. It doesn’t mean it’s the only one we have to use but…’
‘I think the BMW will give us the same thing as the Varadero did,’ Charley insisted. ‘After a period of time we’ll be bored of it. And when it’s loaded up, the BMW…’
‘After a time we’ll be bored with any bike. We’re going to get bored with it because we’re going to be riding it six days a week for fifteen weeks. So listen, let’s not worry about being bored after ten minutes. I think you’ve…’
But Charley cut straight across me: ‘The KTM is a better choice. It’s easier to ride. It’s better balanced.’
‘…I think you’ve got to think in terms of reliability,’ I finished.
Somehow, by the end of January, Charley had got his way. The grin factor won out over rugged reliability and we decided the KTM was for us. By the time we went to meet Erlan Idrissov, the Kazakh ambassador, at his embassy in London, even I was enthusing about the maverick Austrian bike. All we had to do now was persuade KTM to back us. Knowing they didn’t have the resources of a company such as BMW, we had downgraded our expectations of sponsorship. All we wanted was a small financial contribution to the cost of the trip and four 950 Adventurers plus necessary spare parts. It was a big climb-down from our ambition of full sponsorship, one that David found hard to deal with—‘All this exposure for their bikes has a value,’ he insisted. ‘If they’re advertising Long Way Round in the TV guide, starting at eight o’clock, and there’s your two faces and their two motorcycles, that’s bullshit that we’re not getting any dough.’ But we had to accept there was a price to pay for our decision.
Once again, we were being confronted with the dilemma that plagued our entire adventure. Time, not money, was the primary controlling factor. Because of my work commitments, we didn’t have one or two years to prepare for the trip. We had three and a half months. We had to employ people to help us. And that meant we had to pay them. To finance their salaries, we were making a television series, but that required even more staff, who also had to be paid. So we entered the murky world of corporate sponsorship. David, in his unique style, summed up what corporate sponsorship meant the night before KTM arrived at our offices: ‘You can go out and buy a bike retail, cut a film in your own time and do it off your own back. But if you want everything for free, you’re going to have to—how do I say it?—bend over and grab your ankles.’
KTM told us they would bring Thomas Junkers, a German film-maker who had ridden the 950 Adventurer to Siberia, to a meeting at our offices at which we hoped to finalise the deal. That worried us. The night before the meeting, Charley said we had to be really careful. ‘KTM are bringing this guy who’s done it, who’s gone through Siberia, and they want him to have a look at our schedule. But he could just poo-poo it.’
I was sceptical for other reasons. ‘I want to ride across Siberia, but I don’t know that I want to speak to someone who’s already done it. Why? Because he tells you all the stuff he did and you copy him. What’s the point in that?’
The next day Georg Opitz, KTM’s marketing representative, arrived in London with Junkers. Standing in front of us in the workshop was the man we needed to impress if we were to get KTM’s backing, a huge, fleshy beast who we knew would not be easily persuaded that we were up to the job. He had very few words of encouragement, particularly when he saw our proposed route. Large tracts of north-west Kazakhstan were to be avoided, he said, because the Soviets used it as a biological weapons test ground. ‘There is a lot of throat disease around here because of whatever the Soviets were doing,’he said loftily. ‘If you stay here, never drink water. No open food. No open vegetables.’
North-east Kazakhstan was also to be avoided: ‘No, no, no. These roads are not good,’ Junkers insisted. Sweeping his thick fingers across the map, he berated us: ‘Up here is only coal mines’…‘Until 1989, this was the area for the nuclear bombs’…‘This is the only way you can go, whatever they tell you’…‘You will find here a lot of cemeteries. This is a no-go area’…‘You can go there, but it is an area totally destroyed and with a high radiation. Very high.’
We had arranged with the Kazakh ambassador in London—who had assured us his young country was safe, beautiful and well worth visiting—to pass into Russia through a border usually restricted to freight traffic.
Thomas raised his eyebrows: ‘You are sure? This area is normally a no-go area,’ he said categorically. ‘Here you will find military. And then you have to show them something. It is a major problem.’
Thomas’s persistent negativity was grinding us down. Charley attempted to humour him: ‘We can only try and, if it’s not possible, then we just have to go round until we find the next available crossing point.’
‘There is only one entrance and the problem is, you are not allowed to go through it on your own bike,’ Thomas snapped, then stood back triumphantly. Crossing his arms, he looked at us as if we were naïve idiots even to consider any route other than his.
And so it went on. The borders we wanted to use would be closed, according to Thomas. The routes we wanted to take would be impassable, he said. The petrol stations we were counting on for fuel would be empty. The permits, visas and border documents that our back-up team were organising would be worthless in the face of local bureaucracy, he insisted. The contacts we had made with ambassadors, local police and the governments of Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Russia would not help us at all. Again and again he pointed at the map and said: ‘If you are stuck here, that’s the end of your journey. There is no way out.’ And as for our maps, in Thomas’s opinion they were useless compared with Russian military 1:500,000 maps. ‘All I can say is go and buy them,’ he declared.
His harshest criticisms were targeted at our plans for eastern Siberia, where we knew we would face our toughest test on the Road of Bones from Yakutsk to Magadan on the Pacific coast. ‘What do you know about this road?’ he demanded.
‘We’ve spoken to people and we’ve got some details from people who did a motorcycle journey around the world called the Millennium Ride,’ I said.
‘You want to take fourteen days for this?’
‘I think so. We reckoned on fourteen days for it,’ Charley said.
‘Actually, I think we’ve allowed eighteen days for it,’ I chipped in.
‘What do you think if I tell you now you need six weeks for this one?’ Thomas barked.
‘We know that two years ago, one guy did it in…I can’t remember in how many days he did it, but it wasn’t eighteen days. It was less,’ Charley said. ‘There was another group of people who did it last year, this particular bit of the road. And they did it, I think, in sixteen days.’
Thomas was having none of it. He said we were going at the wrong time of the year. In June, he said, Siberia would not yet have fully recovered from its severe winter. Parts of Mongolia and Kazakhstan would also be impassable. It was a fair point, but in complete contrast to the advice given to us by locals. Again and again, Thomas shook his head and tutted, turning down the corners of his mouth in disagreement. We knew we had lost the battle to convince the man with KTM’s ear. Our only hope was that KTM had the balls to back us.
Two days later, on Friday 13th, the call came from KTM. Russ walked into the workshop after speaking on the phone to Georg. ‘Bad news,’ he said. ‘Georg said he had a long meeting yesterday and that it had been a very hard decision. We love the project, Georg said, but Thomas Junkers came back from the meeting in London on Wednesday and said there were bits about Siberia that he was worried…’
‘So they’re withdrawing their offer, they’re not going to give us the bikes or anything?’ I said.
‘Correct,’ said Russ. KTM, for all its Paris–Dakar experience and hard-core image, was concerned that its bikes were not up to carrying two actors on a holiday trip around the world.
The news hit Charley like a ton of bricks: ‘I told you it was a mistake to let him come here. What did Thomas say? That we couldn’t do it? I mean, that it was not possible to do this?’
Charley was pacing the room, running his hands through his hair and swearing. ‘I feel like my whole world has just been…just been taken from under me,’ he wailed. I phoned Georg Opitz.
‘Hello, it’s Ewan McGregor here. Charley and I are a bit shell shocked about why you’ve withdrawn your offer and I’m very interested to find out why. What Mr Junkers has said seems to have influenced you and I feel that’s slightly unfair.’
‘You were presented with a lot of opportunities for failure…’ Georg said enigmatically and went on to list KTM’s concerns.
I came off the phone. ‘They think there’s a huge potential for us to fail. Thomas Junkers said we were better prepared than he thought we would be, but that there were things that could happen that we could not prepare for. He said there are areas that will be unknown to you—and I said yes, that’s what our journey is all about, that’s why we’re doing it. Don’t they get it? It’s an adventure, not a package holiday. And adventures are not adventures if there isn’t a degree of danger and uncertainty about them.’
I turned to Charley: ‘You know we now have to look at whether we go on the BMWs. Or do we get two new Honda Africa Twins and kit them out? What do we do? We have to look at our options now.’
Charley’s response was immediate: ‘We’ll do it with BMW and show them what a fucking great big mistake they made.’ But I could see that Charley was really disappointed.
CHARLEY: KTM saying no was a complete and utter bombshell. I didn’t know what to say or do. I was really impressed that Russ went immediately to BMW and that they came back straight away. They were straightforward and they offered us so much, expressing great happiness and joy and pride at being part of the project. There were no questions about whether we could or couldn’t do it. They really felt it was a great thing and that it was exactly what their bike had been made for. We said, what about eastern Siberia? They said, part of the adventure is to try. If you fail, then that’s fine. As long as you’ve given it a good chance. But I couldn’t get over my disappointment with KTM. I so desperately wanted to go with them, but having spoken to BMW I was really happy now to go on a BMW. It wasn’t the purest kind of bike, but it was probably best suited to the job.
But, most of all, I was really impressed with Ewan. Deep down in his heart, I think he had wanted to go on a BMW right from the off, but he stuck by me and believed in my passion for the KTM, even though I’d become quite blinkered. I really appreciated what Ewan did. He was going with the KTM for me and I felt really honoured about that. It was a big thing. And I really loved him for it.
Exactly two months later we were on the forecourt of the BP garage in Shepherd’s Bush, the glass from my indicator light lying in shards on the tarmac. It was an inauspicious start to the journey. Two months of getting used to the bikes, and a two-day off-road course with BMW, had taught us that the Beamers needed to be treated with respect. These were not two lightweight dirt bikes but a pair of the heaviest bikes on the road. Knowing we would face much more demanding terrain and conditions, we rode out of the petrol station and down Hammersmith Road with our hearts in our mouths. Approaching Hammersmith roundabout, one of the busiest intersections in London, we stopped beside a white van full of builders. ‘Hey, we saw you on TV yesterday,’ one of them shouted out of the window. ‘When are you off?’
‘Now. Right now. We’re on our way to Folkestone. To the Channel tunnel,’ we shouted.
‘I don’t believe it. You’re going right now?’ he shouted back, now leaning right out of the side window. ‘Good luck!’ he yelled, waving his arm. From inside the van came the sound of cheering and his mates roaring: ‘We’ll follow you in Motorcycle News. Have a great time! It’s brilliant what you guys are doing! Have a good one!’
For the first time, it dawned on us that we were really on the road. The day we thought would never come had arrived. The preparation was over and we were taking off, riding towards the sunrise, two mates on the road together for the next three and a half months. It was a great feeling. We whooped and shouted to one another over the intercom radio, giddy with the feeling of escape. It was a beautiful spring day, the kind you dream about, the sky a brilliant cloudless blue, the air warm and soft. The sixty miles to the coast passed in a blur, as all the way to Folkestone people cheered, waved, tooted their car horns and shouted good luck. The big BMWs were purring beneath us, the first miles were under the wheels and it felt great to be alive.