ewan mcgregor & charley boorman in long way round
WATCH IT.
I was privileged enough to meet Austin Vince, who actually paved the way and was an uncredited adviser on The Long Way Round. He has a real chip on his shoulder because of that, and I don’t really blame him - Ewan and Charley are a bunch of posers compared to what Austin did. If you’ve ever been to the International Motorcycle Show and costed up all of the gear that they used, it’s close to $80k for the bikes they’re riding, not including the fact they were followed everywhere by a truck/support crew and a camera man. Who has USD$50k to spend on that? They’re the face of Adventure Motorcycling, but they’re sending the wrong message - you need a big pile of money to go adventure motorcycling if you do it the Ewan and Charley way.
Here’s my short list of impressive people that I consider more impressive than Ewan and Charley:
- Austin Vince - Mondo Enduro (what Ewan and Charley did) and then Terra Circa (included the Zilov Gap, which had never been crossed by motorcycle until they’d done it). These guys did it on a shoestring budget and shitty motorcycles without all the fancy gear.
- Lois “Lois on the loose” Pryce - The female version of Austin Vince. Actually, they’re married to each other. BAMF motolady.
- Warchild, from FJRForum.com - Actually, most of the guys on the FJRForum have done more adventure touring than Charlie and Ewan, on much smaller budgets. But Warchild takes the cake because he holds a Guiness World Record for 7 back-to-back 1500 mi rides. While not an adventure touring thing, he gets recognition purely because of the sheer size of the balls you have to have to pull off something like this. Oh, and he tore his left bicep something like the week before so he was injured while doing it.
- Rashmi Tambe, aka the Red Baroness - If you search for her, you’ll find some photos from the end of her trip where she broke her arm in a bunch of places because the front wheel of her motorcycle fell off the F650GS, which BMW refused to acknowledge as a manufacturing defect and only through her hard work and tenacity finally got them to admit to a problem with the motorcycle front forks. She was the one that dragged me along to see the Austin Vince discussion, and at 5’3” is a pint sized ball of fun.
- Underboning the world couple Re and Colin - Circling the globe on a bunch of Honda Supercub scooters. Talk about adventure on a budget, these guys are taking it to a whole new level. I subscribe heavily to their philosophy and think that while it’s much more difficult to do it the way they did it, what they did was incredibly smart and I would do the same thing.
(Source: inallthecraziness, via pennyonthetrack)
