Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means

 
 
 

 
Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means

 

 
CHARLEY BOORMAN

 
 
Hachette Digital

Table of Contents

 

 

 

Race to Dakar
By Any Means: From Wicklow to Sydney

 
 
 

 
Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means

 

 
CHARLEY BOORMAN

 
 
Hachette Digital

 
Published by Hachette Digital 2009

 
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.

 
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

 

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

 

eISBN : 978 0 7481 1315 6

 

 
This ebook produced by JOUVE, FRANCE

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

 

 
An Hachette UK Company

To Olivia, Doone and Kinvara, for always being there.

 

And to Ewan - thanks for everything.

ON 13 MAY 2009, I felt the wheels of our plane touch the tarmac at Sydney airport. We’d arrived. I felt a rush of exhilaration and relief. All the months of planning and dreaming had come together at last. But my excitement didn’t quite hide the nerves that had been building since long before we set off from London twenty-four hours earlier. I settled back in my seat and tried to relax. Best not to think about all the challenges that lay ahead. My mind drifted back to my last visit to Sydney - and the end of my previous adventure . . .

Just ten months earlier I’d ridden through the Sydney Harbour Tunnel at the end of another mammoth journey. Starting from my dad’s house in County Wicklow, I had crossed Eastern Europe before travelling the length of Iran using any means of transport I could find. I’d been through India, Nepal and China. I’d island-hopped across Indonesia before enduring a dramatic sea voyage from Timor to Darwin on a boat made from Kalimantan ironwood. When we at last stepped ashore, I remember kissing the harbour wall in gratitude.

But that had only been half the journey. I’d always dreamed of pushing on even further - right on through Australia with Japan our final destination. And now that dream was coming true at last. We would begin by heading up the east coast of Australia to Brisbane before continuing north to Cairns. From there it was on to Papua New Guinea, where there had been reports of recent trouble. That was as far ahead as I wanted to think right now.

 

 

The week before I left, just as I started thinking about saying goodbye to my wife Olly and the kids, I began to realise that, despite all my travels, I had learned almost nothing about the business of leaving. Since 2004 I’d ridden a motorbike from London to New York via Russia; I’d raced the Dakar Rally and ridden from John O’Groats to Cape Town. Then last year I’d taken advantage of just about every type of vehicle you could think of during the trip from Ireland to Sydney. But as usual, the week of departure dawned and nothing was ready.

The preparation for this expedition had been fraught with difficulties, not least the onset of a global recession. We had a
sort of
budget and I had a rucksack that was
sort of
packed and that was about it. And there was an added pressure on me this time round, or at least
I
felt there was. On previous trips I had always had either my friend Ewan McGregor or our producer, Russ Malkin, at my side. But Ewan was very busy with his film work, and this time Russ was needed back in London to coordinate the TV series. It’s true that producer Sam Simons and cameraman Robin Shek were flying out with me. And Claudio von Planta - who had joined Ewan and me on our
Long Way
. . . trips, and filmed my Dakar challenge - would be meeting up with us shortly, which I was really pleased about. But there was no getting away from the fact that on this trip, more than any other, the buck stopped with me. If anything went wrong, it would be down to me to sort it out. And while that was exciting in some ways, it was also bloody terrifying . . . I’d spoken to my dad, John, about my worries the last time I saw him. His sister, my aunt Wendy, died recently and my sisters and I went down to the funeral in Cornwall. Dad and I had a bit of time together and I voiced my fears about undertaking this project on my own. Dad pointed out that he was about to begin another massive project himself, and after all his years in the film business he was still suffering from the same kind of nerves.

I knew I was lucky to have Sam and Robin on board. Sam is a really passionate producer/director with a fantastic background in high-quality documentaries, and Robin had worked tirelessly on
Long Way Down
,
Race to Dakar
and
By Any Means
. And as for Claudio - he was, of course, the unsung hero of the two
Long Way
. . . trips, matching his expertise with the camera with an excellent general knowledge of the countries we were travelling through. He has a serious mind, old Claudio, and given my
somewhat
justified reputation for talking bullshit, you could say he’s the ideal foil. It was good to have him back on board.

I’d started the trip envying Claudio, who was flying out after the rest of us and therefore missed seeing his equipment being swabbed for explosives at Heathrow and testing positive. I couldn’t believe it - every item had to be taken out and searched and then we had to go through the incredibly laborious task of putting it all back again. At least they let us fly - to my endless embarrassment I’d been kicked off an aeroplane at the start of
Long Way Down
. I’d never have lived down a repeat performance.

I soon stopped envying Claudio when I saw him arrive, bleary-eyed, at the hotel a couple of days later. He told me he’d hardly slept on the journey at all and there was no time to recover - it was hit the ground running. To my delight we were doing the first leg of the journey on bikes, and Claudio would spend the first day filming from the back of a BMW.

By Any Means
had been a fantastic expedition: 112 forms of transport covering 25 countries in 102 days. As far as I was concerned, the only downside was that I’d have liked more motorbikes. This time I would still be taking different forms of transport, but it wasn’t the means of travel that was important so much as the people I was hoping to meet along the way.

 

 

Suddenly it was all go and the fear really started to kick in. I had an attack of the colly-wobbles, the butterflies I always seem to suffer from as we’re about to set out. It never seems to get any easier. I have the same dreams, the same worries. Will people welcome us? Will anything go wrong? Will I be able to fix it if it does? Originally we were just going to slip quietly north on a couple of motorbikes, but we kept getting hits on the website from bikers suggesting a convoy. I have a love/hate relationship with convoys - I love the feeling of everyone riding together, but I always worry that no one will show up. Every time I do it, I pray that there will be at least a few motorbikes to meet us. So far it’s worked out well, and fortunately this time we’d had some air time on Australia’s morning TV show,
Today
, so I was able to let people know I would be leaving from the Freshwater Reserve in Manly.

I would be riding a customised flat tracker built by Deus Ex Machina, a motorcycle outlet on Parramatta Road and just about the coolest place imaginable. It truly is one of a kind, a large showroom with a workshop where they specialise in taking Kawasaki W650s and turning them into street trackers - an homage to the racing bikes they used back in the 1950s and 1960s. The company is run by Dare Jennings, a tall, extremely laid-back man with an easy smile and very dry sense of humour. Dare is a mad-keen biker and ex ‘big-wave rider’.

Dare’s place is different from any bike shop I’ve been in. There are so many amazing machines, and not just Deus creations, but ancient Harleys, an original Indian, a fully restored Indian . . . the imagination his team has put into the place is visible. Everyone is really into what they do and they produce some seriously impressive bikes. The one they had for me was a Kawasaki based on an old BSA. The Japanese designer was an ardent fan of British bikes and had bought the patent and copied the style - the W650 could have been a badged BSA complete with jam-pot cylinder heads, the works. One of the mechanics explained to me that the Deus principle is to simplify the bike Kawasaki put out - they take the weight off and stand the back end up a bit so that the bike turns nicely into the corners. They work on the suspension - the exhaust is invariably a burbling two-into-one - and the tail had been cut down and flared to give it a sort of ‘bobber’ look. Mine had a red and pale blue paint job and the seat was fibreglass, padded and covered with studded leather. After being stuck on a plane for twenty-four hours and with the heebie-jeebies gnawing, I just wanted to throw my leg over and go for a blat.