By Any Means: His Brand New Adventure From Wicklow to Wollongong

 
 
 

 
By Any Means

 

 
CHARLEY BOORMAN

 
 
Hachette Digital

Table of Contents

 

Race to Dakar

 
 
 

 
By Any Means

 

 
CHARLEY BOORMAN

 
 
Hachette Digital

 
Published by Hachette Digital 2008

 
Copyright © Biting Insects Ltd

 

 
The moral right of the author has been asserted.

 

 
All rights reserved.

 
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

 

 
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

 

 
ISBN 978 0 7481 1105 3

 

 
This ebook produced by JOUVE, FRANCE

 

 
Hachette Digital
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DY

 

 

 
An Hachette Livre UK Company

For my darling family: Olivia, Doone and Kinvara.

And for Françoise and her dear family she leaves behind

Picture credits

1 (both pictures), 2, 3 (all three pictures), 4 (all three pictures), 27 (bottom), 28 (all three pictures), 29 (all three pictures), 30 (all three pictures), 31 (top) · Ollie Blackwell

22 (bottom), 23, 24 (top) · Julian Broad

12 (middle) · Jo Ford

17 (both pictures), 24 (bottom), 25 (all three pictures), 26 (bottom) · Anne Holst

31 (bottom), 32 (both pictures) · Nick Long

5 (bottom), 6 (middle and bottom), 7 (middle), 9 (all three pictures), 10 (top and middle), 11 (both pictures), 12 (top and bottom), 13 (both pictures), 14 (all three pictures), 15 (middle), 16 (top), 18 (both pictures), 19 (top), 20 (top), 21 (all three pictures) · Russ Malkin

5 (both top pictures), 8 (top), 10 (bottom), 26 (top), 27 (top) · Mungo

22 (top) · Nick Ray

15 (top and bottom), 16 (bottom), 19 (bottom), 20 (bottom) · Robin Shek

7 (top and bottom) · Lucy Trujillo

1

Permission to Board

The weather in Ireland is like nowhere else in the world.

Take the morning of 12 April 2008. I’m standing outside my dad’s house on the edge of the Wicklow Mountains and I can see blue sky and sunshine. I can also see a dull, wispy cloud, and - on the other side of the house - some ominous-looking thunderheads.

Russ comes out. Gazing up he raises one eyebrow. ‘Which way are we going?’

I point to where the sky is bluest. ‘That way: where you can feel the love.’

I’m wearing an open-faced helmet and goggles, and my Belstaff jacket. Russ is wearing old-fashioned motorbike boots, an aged leather jacket and a silk scarf. I throw my leg over my hand-built T110 ‘Bobber’. In just a few moments we’ll be on our way. To Sydney. Australia.

 

It had been Russ’s idea.

In August 2007 Ewan and I had completed our ‘Long Way Down’ trip from John O’Groats to Cape Town. Russ Malkin was our expedition leader - he’s also a great friend and along with Ewan had been instrumental in getting not only Long Way Down off the ground but also our first trip, Long Way Round. It was now the back end of 2007, and Russ and I were kicking around a few suggestions about what we should do next.

In November we flew to Valencia for the last Moto GP of the season. I’ve got a lot of friends in the paddock: Chris Vermeulen, Randy Mamola, Kenny Roberts - it’s a race we always try to get to. I was really excited because I had been invited to do a couple of laps on the back of Randy’s two-seater Ducati on the race day itself. I think Russ was jealous. He said nothing, but he had to be, didn’t he? I’d be green with envy: a couple of laps on a GP bike that weighs 165 kg and produces in excess of 250 bhp. Michael Schumacher himself had ridden it just a few weeks before.

On Saturday night we ate dinner in the hotel. Qualifying for the race was over and Dani Pedrosa was on pole. It was going to be a cracking finale to the season and I was looking forward to it. At the same time, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I would do once the season was over. I was eager to start on a new adventure. As we finished eating I brought up the subject of the Australian Safari: a southern hemisphere ‘Dakar’ with bikes, cars and trucks. It started in Kununurra, Western Australia, and finished in Perth six days later.

‘I wouldn’t mind doing it,’ I told Russ, ‘but I don’t know if it’s feasible.’

‘We could do it,’ Russ said. ‘You know we could. We did the Dakar, we could do this.’

‘What about the logistics?’

He shrugged. ‘We could set most of it up down there. It wouldn’t be hard, but then it wouldn’t be that challenging either. All you would have to do is jump on a plane.’

Jump on a plane, right. Somehow that didn’t inspire me. Jump on a plane and get where we’re going just as fast as we can. I can’t help feeling sometimes that we’re all rushing through our lives, living so quickly that we’re burning out in the process. It reminded me of what Ewan had said about our trip through Africa: we hadn’t always allowed ourselves enough time. I wanted to be sure with my next trip that we always factored in enough time to experience everything properly.

Russ opened his wallet to pay the bill and his boarding pass fell out. I picked it up. ‘It’s all so easy,’ I said, turning the pass round in my hand. ‘You go to an airport, get one of these, jump on a plane and fly off to wherever you’re going. Anywhere you like. Anywhere in the world.’

Russ looked at me thoughtfully. ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘We don’t have to do the Safari, but we can still go to Australia.’

‘What do you mean?’

Taking the boarding pass he scribbled the word ‘London’ in the top left-hand corner. Then he wrote ‘Sydney’ in the bottom right-hand corner. ‘You remember back in Cape Town, Charley: you said how lucky we were to travel all those old roads while they were still there.’

I nodded. I remembered only too well: it had been all I could think about as Ewan and I rode the last bit of dirt to Cape Agulhas.

‘You remember how we talked about doing an expedition just for the hell of it, packing up and taking off: no back-up trucks, no medic, no security? So why don’t we?’ Russ traced a line on the boarding pass between London and Sydney. ‘We could do that,’ he said. ‘London to Sydney. Only we don’t take a plane. The roads in Africa were made by donkeys and camels; they were made by thousands of people walking. They were made by tuk-tuks and old taxis, those ancient buses with a million people packed on them.’ He paused for a moment, thinking. ‘How about this: we go to Australia by any means we can other than taking a plane from Heathrow. We pick a route and cross each country, each piece of water, using a different form of transport. We jump on trains and old buses: we hitch a ride with some long-distance lorry driver somewhere; someone who’s been making the trip for years.’

Now I could see where he was coming from. ‘I get you,’ I said, starting to catch his excitement. ‘We’d have to do some of it on motorbikes, though; Christ, I’d get withdrawal symptoms. Maybe we could ride some old British bikes: Ewan and I were going to Bantam around Britain one day. Bloody hell, I like this, Russ! It sounds like a lot of fun. It’s the kind of thing I used to do as a kid. Dad would be off to the Amazon or God knows where, and we’d all just clear off with him.’

‘How is your dad by the way?’

‘He’s really well.’ I started telling Russ how my dad was working on a project about Hadrian. It was the usual nightmare - trying to find an ‘A’ list lead in order to green-light the film.

I soon realised Russ wasn’t really listening to my thoughts on the perils of working in the film industry. I could see his mind was whirring again. ‘Wouldn’t it be great to start the trip from County Wicklow?’

‘You mean from Dad’s place?’

‘Why not? It’s where you grew up, it’s where you rode your first motorbike.’

I felt a smile spread across my face. ‘County Wicklow to Sydney, by any means possible. You know, it does have a ring to it, Russ . . .’

 

Since then everything had happened so quickly. After just a couple of months’ preparation, here we were in Ireland, ready to leave my dad’s house at the start of another major expedition. My only regret was that I would be away from my wife and daughters again so soon after the last one.

Along with our new cameraman, Mungo, Russ and I had stayed the night with my dad in the house I’d grown up in - an old rectory with the River Avonmore running through the grounds. I remember Dad always said that although the house might belong to him, and the land perhaps, the river was only passing through.

The whole expedition was going to be filmed as a fly-on-the-wall documentary and we’d considered a few different camera operators: what we needed was someone who could do the job day in day out for three and a half months, carry the gear we’d need and put up with Russ and me at the same time. Not much to ask, was it? When we met Paul Mungeam (or Mungo as he’s known to his mates) we knew we had the right guy. Emerging from the kitchen now, he took a lingering look at my saddle; very small and very thin. ‘You’re going to have a numb bum,’ he said.

Dad came out with his hands in his pockets. ‘I wish you’d fuck off,’ he said. ‘You’re churning up my lawn.’ He looked at me with a glint in his eyes. ‘Motorbikes,’ he muttered. ‘I have no feeling for them, nothing at all. I suppose they’re a nice way of prolonging adolescence, but when I was a boy I wanted to be a man.’ Then he grinned and gave me a hug. ‘Good luck, Charley. I’m proud of you.’

I hugged him back - and I’ll admit we were both a little tearful. I’m not sure if my dad realised this, but in a way it was because of him that I was doing this trip. He and my mum instilled in me the sense of wanderlust, the desire to see new places and get to know people I’d never ordinarily meet.