Boorman Charley - Long way round: chasing shadows across the world

Magadan

EWAN : On the last day, I walked down to the harbour. Having slept late, I had breakfast on my own and went for a wander. I wanted to get to the ocean; I needed to see the Pacific. Not knowing the right way, I stumbled down the hill, through rows and rows of tenements, nodding, smiling and waving at the people I passed, eventually arriving at the waterfront. I turned around, lifted my camera to my eye and took a photograph. There it was: Magadan, Siberia. The place that had been in my dreams and thoughts for two years, like a mythical city forever beyond my reach. I wanted to capture it, somehow hold on to it and take a part of it with me when we began the long journey home.

I walked on. The path led to the beach. Although it was the last day of June, it was the first day the sun had shone in Magadan that year. Three weeks earlier, it had snowed. But that day, the air was warm and soft, the sky a cloudless blue. Women wore bikinis and small children were running naked across the sands. Families were eating picnics or cooking on barbecues. I walked past them all, along the entire length of the beach, until I came to the harbour. I climbed up on to a quayside and sat on a mushroom shaped bollard. An Alsatian came over and sat next to me. I scratched its head for a while, gazed out at the ocean and thought back to the day when Charley and I had sat in a little workshop in west London, surrounded by motorbikes, with dreams of the open road in our heads. All we knew then was that we wanted to get from London to Magadan. With the maps laid out in front of us, we drew a route, arbitrarily assigning mileage to each day, not knowing anything about the state of the roads. We guessed our way from west to east, across two continents, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, as far as it was possible to ride a motorbike in a straightish line. Time and again we were told by experienced travellers that our plans were wildly optimistic and that we didnt know what we were letting ourselves in for. Id never ridden off-road and Charley had never properly camped. The chances of failure were high, they said. Yet here we were in Magadan, as far around the globe from home as it was possible to go, and wed arrived one day ahead of our schedule.

I thought back to the day a month or so earlier when we had been in Mongolia. It was mid-afternoon and we were riding through a beautiful valley. I pulled over and got off my bike. Charley, ahead of me, stopped too. He swung his bike around and rode back towards me. Before he even arrived, I could feel it coming off him: why are we stopping? Were not getting petrol, were not stopping to eat: why are we stopping?

I walked away from Charley. I didnt want to tell him that I had stopped because wed passed the place. The place that had been in my dreams. The place wed fantasised about months before wed even set off from London. A place with a river of cool, white water and a field nearby to pitch our tents. The place we were going to stop at in the middle of an afternoon so that we could cool our sweaty feet in the river while catching fish that wed cook that evening on an open fire under a star-speckled sky.

Id seen that river half an hour earlier. There was no question at all that it was the place. A beautiful big white river and nobody for hundreds of miles. And we had ridden straight past it.

I sat down for five minutes, just needing to look at the countryside around us. The countryside that we often didnt have time to take in because we were always so intent on keeping to our schedule.

Then we got back on our bikes and moved on. A few weeks later, we arrived at the first big river in Siberia. It was too wide, too fast and too deep to cross on a motorbike. There was a bridge, but it had collapsed. I thought Charley would be itching to get ahead, impatient with the hold-up. But he was in his element. He knew that someone or something would be along to help. The delays were the journey. Wed get across it when we got across it.

I understood now that it didnt really matter that we hadnt stopped beside that cool, fast-flowing Mongolian river. The imperfections in our journey were what made it perfect. And maybe we wouldnt be in Magadan now if wed not had that burning desire to keep going. After all, the river would always be there. Now that I knew what was out there, I could always return.

EWAN : Every journey begins with a single step. In our case it was eight years ago, when Charley walked up to me in Caseys, a pub that was more like someones living room than a bar, at Sixmilebridge in County Clare. Except for an eager and winning smile, there was nothing in the way of an introduction.

You ride bikes, he said.

Yeah, I replied hesitantly, taken aback by the gregarious, long haired stranger in front of me.

With our wives and daughters we had moved into cottages on location in Ireland to shoot Serpents Kiss , a movie I will always remember fondly for the many long nights of drinking, partying and discussing bikes. It was the kick-off party on the eve of the first days shooting and although Charley and I didnt know it yet, we had a lot in common. We were both married with daughters only a few months old, wed both been successful actors for some time and we were facing weeks of working closely together. There was a lot we could have talked about, but Charley has an instinct for cutting through social niceties straight to the subject closest to a persons heart. This time was no exception. Charleys in-your-face affability had got the better of my reserve.

Yeahyeah, I ride a 78 Motoguzzi, I said, referring to my first big bike, a heavy Italian machine built like a tractor. And with that, we were away. The evening dissolved into a long night of biker anecdotes and bonding over tales of fatherhood.

Over the next few days and weeks, I came to realise our first meeting was typical for Charley, who always seemed to come into a conversation from the opposite end to anyone else, an enviable trait that swiftly broke the ice. The shoot was very slow and there was even more hanging about than usual on a film set, so we just headed down to Caseys Bar, where we joined Pete Postlethwaite and other cast members, playing poker, sinking pints of Guinness and Harp and spinning yarns. It was a great time, and an opportunity to relax and have some fun in an otherwise quiet, small town in the middle of rural Ireland, and the more we got to know each other, the more we found we had in common. We shared the same attitude to parentingone of total integration of our children into our lives. As a child, Charley had been through many of the experiences with his fathertravelling the world from film set to film set, changing schools every few monthsthat I suspected my children would face. We got on so well that by the time of the wrap party I had asked Charley to be godfather to my daughter, Clara.