Long Way Round - Ewan McGregor, Charley Boorman

Following on from the success that the Long Way Round came to be, Ewan Mcgregor and Charley Boorman decided to set off on another trip on their motorbikes. This time the intention was to ride from John O'Groats in Scotland to Cape Town in South Africa. The trip would cover some 15000 miles, visiting 20 different countries in just under 3 months on the road. This book is the accompaniment to the BBC series of the same name and gives a further insight into the trip and what appears to have been an amazing, eye opening trip for both of them. Now I'd never really paid much attention to the first trip and it wasn't until I started to watch this series on TV that I ...  Read the complete review

This was a book I bought my husband for christmas, which he really wanted to read after seeing the TV series. It is written by actors Ewan McGregor (Star wars, Miss Potter, Moulin Rouge....) and his best friend, Charley Boorman (Hope and Glory, The Bunker...), who met on a film set and discovered a shared love of motorbikes. In 2004, the two set off on their first motorbike adventure, Long Way Round, where they traveled east around the globe. After the success of that journey, thy soon decided to start planning their next adventure, and that is where Long Way Down fits in. A three month journey from the northerly tip of Scotland to the very south of Africa, covering ...  Read the complete review

Long Way Round - Chasing Shadows Across the World by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman is the companion book to the TV series of the same name, which saw Charley and Ewan journey 20,000 miles in increasingly tough terrain from London to New York, crossing the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Russia along the way. I absolutely adored both the Long Way Round and the Long Way Down when they were on the television and after reading the Long Way Down earlier this year I decided that it was high time I read this one. I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed every single page of this book and the true spirit of the boys that travelled it and the journey itself really ...  Read the complete review

When we succumbed to the advertising and bought a set top digital television box, we were rather disappointed (an under-statement) to find out exactly what you get for your (one-off) payment of fifty quid. I can safely say that during the first three months the only thing we made a point of watching was "Long Way Round", which had already been screened on Sky One. My feelings about the book more or less mirror what I thought about the television series but I bought the book on impulse when I saw it on e-bay without having seen a copy in the shops. Therefore I did not know whether the book accompanied the series (in which case I hoped that it would ...  Read the complete review

The 19,000 mile trip in question is not the distance you need to travel around Ewan McGregor's head these days but a motorbike journey he, his best mate Charley Boorman and what felt like a 200 back-up team, trail blazed from London to NY in the year of 2004. Ewan and Charlie became firm friends after meeting on the set of the highly rated film, The Emerald Forest (1985), directed by Charley's famous dad Peter Borman, his son clearly cast because of. Charley, of course, is an atrocious actor and it's unclear if he has worked since. This is his only film listed in the Radio Times film book. But he knows Ewan, they both like bikes, and his dad is very rich so here ...  Read the complete review