“Long Way Round” 20 Years Later

Many motorcycle owners dream of riding their bikes around the world, miles away from the nearest reminders of the modern reality, while camping under the stars. But relatively few have the means to do so.

This week marks 20th anniversary of the TV debut of Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman's Long Way Round in which the duo, accompanied by cameraman Claudio von Planta, rode their BMW R1150 GS Adventures on a global trip from McGregor's native Scotland to New York by way of Europe, Asia, and North America.

The main draw for McGregor and Boorman was the opportunity to visit remote Central Asian states that at the time saw relatively few western visitors, and experience the forbidding gravel roads of Russia's far east as well as the near-complete absence of paved roads in Mongolia.

Months before the trio departed Scotland, the team started working on what would be one of the main hurdles of the adventure besides the treacherous roads: Securing the visas for over a dozen different countries. An office was set up with staff working on the adventurers' papers, as well as the papers for the production crew that would follow in two SUVs, usually traveling a day or so behind the three bikes.

The trip itself started with a double-shot of major setbacks.

First, bike manufacturer KTM elected not to provide the bikes for the trip, with Boorman suggesting that KTM felt they would fail, and proceeding to tear down their posters from the office walls in anger.

Second, cameraman von Planta failed his motorcycle license test on his first attempt, a day before the team's scheduled departure, which meant that McGregor and Boorman would have to start the journey without him, and he would have to join the duo at a slightly later stage of the European part of the journey.

Once the duo had set off, western Europe flew by in a matter of days, being the easiest part of the trip, and one which was more touristy than any other stage of the journey.

After stops in France, Belgium and Germany, the adventurers entered the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Ukraine, and things quickly became far less touristy, yet still being the decidedly comfortable part of the trip with plenty of gas stations and hotels.

The Czech Republic was also where the paperwork problems at border crossings began.

While the European part of the journey offered plenty of paved roads, by the time the duo entered Kazakhstan, road quality had diminished quite a bit.

A stopover by the rapidly shrinking Aral Sea allowed the pair to highlight the phenomenon of man-made climate change, with the sea having dwindled to a collection of salty ponds in a matter of years after irrigation projects decades ago had gone awry.

But even the Kazakhstan legs of the journey were a warm-up for the real event—driving through Mongolia and the unpaved roads in the Russian Far East.

Out of these two regions Mongolia provided the greatest challenge for the trio, but only by a narrow margin, and only because there weren't that many rivers to cross. And the three riders still let their steeds run away from them on a few occasions, while the support SUVs also had some mishaps.

A few mechanical issues plagued the various machines, forcing the team to seek help from the locals.

The Russian Far East, on the way to Magadan, provided the series with the most vehicular carnage, with the trio and their support team in two SUVs and an UAZ 452 van being forced to cross streams that washed away roads, sometimes while being helped by a Ural or KamAZ truck. This part of the journey was easily the most daunting and the most memorable, with the trio being forced to double back on a few occasions in search of passable roads.

We won't spoil the details of all the mayhem, but let's just say that von Planta finished the journey, but his BMW GS bike did not. And the support crew's SUV had also suffered a rollover in Mongolia at one point.

Following the Asian part of the journey, riding through Canada and the US should have been an easy jog to the finish, but McGregor's bike was rear-ended by a car outside of Calgary, of all places, ultimately being one of the closest calls with disaster over the whole weeks-long adventure.

The journey itself stretched from the middle of April through the end of July, with the first episode airing October 18, 2004.

The series was an instant hit, being one of the first modern motorcycle documentaries to reach a worldwide audience, while also shedding light on the cultures, social issues, cuisine, and terrain in a number of rarely visited regions.

Enough has changed in that part of the world over the past two decades for a modern rerun of the same route to be unrecognizable, perhaps enough to yield a different experience.

In 2024, much of Ukraine is perhaps a no-go for motorcycle adventurers, the Central Asian states have largely built up their road networks to pass for those of Gulf states, WiFi is not a rarity it once was, and the Aral Sea has... actually seen a period of modest growth, even though it may never return to what it once was.

Satellite navigation is now a gadget on a motorcycle in a way it was not in 2004, and so are lightweight dash and helmet cameras. And charting an identical journey in 2024 is now more a matter of swiping the phone or tablet attached to the gas tank of your motorcycle than squinting at a paper map.

Digital photography, which we now take for granted, was also in its early years during the duo's trip. And its unavailability just a few years prior would have prevented the documentary from being filmed the way it was, a day's ride away from the support crew, as it would have required much larger cameras recording on videotape.

Also, social media did not exist, preventing the riders from having the ability to snap photos with phones and immediately post them online. That's a good thing, given how demanding the roads were, and it also allowed the riders a measure of solitude and reflection that probably wouldn't exist on what would be a hyper-social journey today.

Among other types of "progress," traffic speed cameras are now plentiful along quite a bit of the once-desolate route through eastern Europe and Asia, as are various local Airbnbs and American-style fast food chains.

Twenty years ago McGregor and Boorman still had the benefit of one crucial technology that afforded a measure of safety, and that was a satellite phone and a support team being a few hours away.

The duo went on to produce two more travel documentaries, including Long Way Down, riding from Scotland to the coast of South Africa, and Long Way Up, from Tierra del Fuego in Argentina to Los Angeles, with the latter series airing in 2020.

Electric Harley Davidson Livewire motorbikes were used for the third series, resulting in some range anxiety as you've no doubt guessed, even after Rivian installed some 150 chargers along the route. It also lent this third TV series a very different flavor.

The challenge, in effect, was constantly juicing up electric bikes, rather than riding under nothing but the sky and the stars in Mongolia with no one around for miles.

Overall, the two sequels never quite replicated the genuine sense of peril of the journey through Mongolia and the Russian far east in the early 2000s, in what was a different time.

And that's why this first series is worth a rewatch even if you're not into motorcycles, as it's already a window into a slightly different world.