I
asked Charley when Ewan dropped his bike the first time. ‘I can’t remember where it
was exactly but it was one of those stupid times when, being as heavily overloaded as they were,
the bike just slipped away from him. I think he was probably even standing still. The bikes were
too heavy and you know, once you feel them begin to go you can only step out of the way; if you
tried to keep it up you’d hurt yourself. We dropped the bikes a lot like this.’
The cynics say that this trip wasn’t based in reality because the guys had a support crew along.
Charley got a tad agitated when I flung that thought at him.
‘It all started because Ewan and I are crap at keeping to a daily journal and everyone said we
should do that because we’d be seeing so much we’d forget half of it. We decided to do a video
diary and the whole idea of doing a film grew from that, but there was a big price to pay. We had
loads of equipment that an overlander wouldn’t ordinarily carry. We had film, bike cameras,
helmet cameras, voice activated recording microphones and so the list went on. It all added a lot
of weight and the issue was that we had to be able to swap used film for blanks. We linked up
with the support team at borders, because of the paperwork involved with all the equipment, and
then every six or seven days on the road. This was just for a night mostly; we did the swap and
then got out on the road again. We sort of dropped in on them, and then dropped out again. The
support team did a lot of the scenery filming which meant that we were free to concentrate on
actually riding the trip, dealing with the roads, meeting people and all of the other things that as
an overlander you would like to be doing.’
‘We also found ourselves doing the riding as a team of three rather than just the two of us;
Claudio a camera man joined up with us. We were really lucky with him in so many ways; he
turned out to be a superb camera man, an excellent rider and the sort of bloke that we could get
on with too. Yeah, really lucky as it could have been a disaster. The other thing that was brilliant
about Claudio was that he had no ambition to make any decisions. To begin with we asked his
opinion, but he always replied “You know, I don’t think, I just follow” – Charley said that with an
appropriate Italian accent. ‘So, we had a shadow who was fun to be with, but who never got in the
way of our dream. I know that we were really lucky with the whole film thing and the support
crew had a hard time of it too; Russ rolled his 4x4 at one stage. If you think about it, one of the
costs of making the film was that we had to keep on linking up with them; w e didn’t have all of
the usual freedom of the road, but I think that it was well worth it. They weren’t there to make
decisions for us or to make the trip easier, but to make the film possible. The film has meant that
we are in a position to share something special with people who would never have the chance to
go out and do it themselves. You know, if we hadn’t have gotten the film deal we’d have gone
anyway.’
I wanted to know if Charley, hand on heart, thought it was an advantage or a disadvantage to be a
film star on a trip like this. He laughed and said, ‘Ninety percent of the places we went to no one
knew who the hell we were so it didn’t make any difference one way or another. The other thing
is that no one knows who you are when you have a helmet on and people had often decided that
they were going to talk with us even before the helmets came off.’
Charley told me that he was more nervous and worried than scared on the trip. The guys had had
been in places where everyone carried a gun and behaved in an almost gangsterish way. This he
explained was more bizarre than frightening. He went on to tell me that there had been moments
when the road had been so bad that they had both ridden fearful of ‘that’ fall which would break
a leg and end the trip. Ewan didn’t have much off road experience, though we’d both done the
BMW off road course. It was a brilliant course but I think it left Ewan realising how much he didn’t
know. He really worried how he’d do, but when you are out there you learn as you go.’