Cape Town - He once sat in a hole in the Western Sahara next to his crashed motorcycle, with two broken hands, worrying that the next vehicle to come along would drive over him.
He’s eaten sheep’s testicles inMongolia, or tried to and failed.
And a man called Igor entertained him with a machine gun and a guitar in the Ukraine.
A close friend of top actor Ewan McGregor and his co-star in the adventure motorcycle series, The Long Way Around and The Long Way Down, Charley Boorman’s youthful-looking face and expletive-filled language have entertained many a lounge lizard parked in front of a television screen.
Nowadays, Boorman regularly rides a motorcycle around southern Africa. And, thanks to his highly entertaining, adventurous two-wheeled efforts, there are plenty of people from well-heeled societies across the world who are prepared to pay to tag along.
Boorman led exactly such a group out of Cape Town last Friday, headed for the wide open spaces of Namibia, the sub-tropical bush of the Caprivi, primeval Botswana and through wild Zimbabwe, to finish at the thunderous Victoria Falls.
Last Wednesday, at a dinner hosted by the Double Tree by Hilton Hotel in Woodstock, Boorman spent an evening regaling a large group of guests with tales of his exploits and adventures and telling about experiences which he believes will stay with him for the rest of his life.
Before dinner, though, he had a bit of time to kill and agreed to do it in my company and provide some details of his life on two wheels.
According to Boorman, the very fact that his parents did not want him to ride motorcycles led to him riding them, even at a very young age when he was playing around with a friend’s little motorcycle.
It was, however, Boorman’s friendship with McGregor that really developed his love for bikes and motorcycling.
The two men became very close friends who not only rode together but, also for a while, ran a motorcycle racing team together.
They ended up talking about doing a long ride together. At first they were going to ride down to Spain where they would meet their families for a summer holiday. Then, they were talking about riding to China because McGregor’s wife was from there.
“One day Ewan called me and said, ‘Charlie, come over, I have an idea of what we should do’,” Boorman recalls.
“I got to his place and he had a little map there and said, ‘Let’s forget about China, if we are going through Russia, we might as well go all the way across and over the Bering Strait and head for New York’. And I thought, yes, why not?
“If you are going to try and convince somebody to travel, do it with a small map – the distances look like nothing on a small map,” Boorman says ruefully.
In the end, it took several years of preparation to do The Long Way Around.
“At that stage, I had no money. I had a wife, kids and a mortgage and my acting career was nowhere, so I was painting and decorating people’s homes. Ewan had just done Star Wars, so he was alright, but we had to find a way to get the money for the trip.
“Somebody then decided we should do a book and we soon got that idea sold to people, but then we wondered how we were going to do it. I mean, I am dyslexic, how do I do a book? We could not just do the ride, come home and start writing, I mean, you would forget stuff. And you could never take enough notes.”
So a suggestion was made that they should take video equipment and film the trip. Then they tried to sell it to atelevision service.
“The problem with it is you do not know what is going to happen, so it is hard to sell to television. ‘That is nice, one guy said, but who gets voted off’? and I immediately said, hey, the famous Ewan McGregor is never going to get voted off, so it will be me. No thanks!”
Eventually, it turned into a monster undertaking, with a film crew and support vehicles, huge administration and management. But the resulting programmes saw to it that the market for adventure motorcycles like the BMWs the two men rode, increased by over60 percent worldwide.
It was on that trip that Igor took care of their entertainment needs and a family of traditional Mongolians invited them into their wooden-framed animal skin home and offered them a meal of sheep’s testicles. While McGregor managed it, Boorman failed spectacularly, but the stoical Mongolians fortunately took it in their stride.
After this trip and the one down Africa for The Long Way Down, Boorman chose to take part in the notorious Dakar Rally in 2006 and put together a team. On the fifth day of the 16-day event, still held in Africa, he crashed heavily, breaking his hands.
But sheer bloody-minded tenacity made him stay with the programme and, with both hands in casts, he helped manage the team to the point where they were able to get one rider out of three to finish. Only 67 out of more than 200 bikesfinished.
Boorman is quite happy to admit his acting career never succeeded.
“My father (John Boorman) was a well-known film director and directed movies such as Excalibur.
“When he needed a child to play a role in a movie, he would use me and my sister. After all, his own kids came free of charge, not so?
“Lee Marvin was my godfather and a very close friend of my father’s. My father directed the very successful Point Blank in which Lee Marvin starred.
“But I was hopeless at reading scripts. I’d agree to a film because it sounded like it was going to be filmed in a nice place and only afterwards I would check out the story to find it was rubbish.”
But motorcycles and motorcycling proved to be his real vocation. After a rest at Victoria Falls in about a month’s time, a new group of riders will join him and they will tackle the long ride back to Cape Town.
“My wife is a very patient woman. She keeps things working while I am gone on a trip. In the past she had often been on her own with the kids for up to four months. We’ve been married for 25 years now and apart from being a great partner, she is also quite hot, you know. It is just wonderful to go back to her,” Boorman said.
Cape Argus