Long Way Down Read online

  The others were being stripped of their possessions, the gunmen moving around us and talking rapidly. Every now and then they fired their guns in the air, and looking up again I noticed Charley was gone.

  Without thinking I opened my mouth. ‘Where’s Charley?’ I said. He must have made a run for it.

  Of course our captors heard me and the next thing I knew the man in the ski mask stalked over to the trees at the edge of the clearing. We couldn’t see anything but moments later a single shot rang out.

  We were on our knees, hunched forward, elbows on the ground and our hands on our heads.

  ‘Is Charley dead?’ someone whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Charley’s dead.’

  The exercise over, Charley appeared alive and well and grinning from ear to ear. I wagged my head at him. ‘Charley,’ I said. ‘You stupid fucking bastard.’

  It was only an exercise, but given the times we live in not unrealistic. It was very dramatic, very believable and also very sobering: one of us being marched away and the sound of a single gunshot.

  Charley felt a bit guilty, but then he reckoned he’d had the chance and took it. He told us that in a real situation he wouldn’t have been caught behind a tree, he’d have kept going until he could raise the alarm. Later we found out that there had been a real kidnap, involving British Embassy staff in Afar, where that’s pretty much exactly what happened.

  CHARLEY: The hostile training exercises were hugely constructive. In the next one we arrived at a checkpoint to be confronted by a couple of armed men standing beside a massive lorry. I left the engine running and another Kalashnikov-toting guard came up to the vehicle. He wore a machete at his side and I thought about the horror stories.

  ‘ID.’ The guard was peering at me out of cold and humourless eyes.

  Ewan, David and I were in a twin cab pickup with Russ perched on the flatbed. Ewan passed me the polythene bag containing all our papers and permits.

  ‘We’re tourists,’ I told the guard. ‘We’re going to Cape Town.’

  He wanted to see our passports and made me switch off the engine. He told us we couldn’t film and insisted we get out of the car. Two more guards arrived and with them a white guy in sunglasses wearing a folded Arab keffiyeh around his head. He told us the road was closed, but I assured him we were working with UNICEF helping children, and his government had issued us with the requisite travel permit. He demanded to see it and Ewan dug it out before another guard took him off a few paces and made him kneel down.

  He didn’t say why, he just made Ewan drop to his knees. Even in an exercise it’s hard to keep smiling and the tone of the conversation agreeable, when your mate is on his knees with a pistol pointed at his head.

  The man with the headgear kept asking us where we’d come from and where we were going. He was interested in our truck and our gear, which the other guards spilled out on the ground. He was really interested in the fact that neither Ewan nor I could get the back seat on the crew cab folded forward. We told him we’d never used it, but it only made him suspicious. We had the right papers but it was clear he thought we’d stolen the truck. He wanted to know what we were doing with hand-held radios and we tried to explain about filming and staying in contact with our other vehicle. What other vehicle? It hadn’t turned up yet and now he was even more suspicious.

  I tried to lead the conversation, offering him cigarettes, and all the time he was looking at the camera and asking me what it was worth. Foolishly, I told him about $400, which is roughly what it cost from new. With hindsight I know I’d just set the amount he needed to be bribed otherwise he’d confiscate it.

  Ewan was still on his knees and he was trying to explain that we had to have the camera because we were filming in order to help the children in their country. Finally he was allowed to get up and we bribed our way back into the truck, being very polite and friendly, smiling a lot, the nerves all too real even in role play.

  They lifted the barrier and we crawled through, travelling all of ten or twelve paces before they stopped us again and insisted we switch off the engine. And all the while these other armed men were watching us from the big truck.

  ‘Fuck this,’ Ewan muttered. ‘If we ever get going again – just drive, Charley.’

  This was only an exercise, but we found ourselves jabbering away, saying all the things we probably would say if it was real. There’s nothing quite like being confronted by a bunch of testosterone-fuelled warriors sporting Kalashnikovs.

  Finally we were allowed to move on but just a few hundred yards down the track we came across a wrecked car. An old Fiat had flipped on its side and we saw an injured girl – a tourist – lying on the ground. She was bleeding heavily from her thigh, and we could hear her terrified screams even before we stopped. Again it seemed very real; the car, the way she was lying, her cries of pain and fear. Grabbing the medical bag Ewan was at her side in a flash.

  ‘All right, my darling, you’re going to be all right.’ He set about staunching the wound. ‘We’re going to help you. You’ve had quite a turn, but you’ll be all right now.’

  David helped him while Russ and I took a look at the car. Inside we found another girl unconscious and trapped in her seat. I was instantly reminded of the time my wife Ollie and I spent in Australia before we were married. We were driving in the mountains somewhere and we came across just such an incident. A car had flipped off a bridge and a woman was trapped upside down inside. She was screaming about her children. At the time I could see no sign of any children and I didn’t know whether she might have banged her head or something. But fuel was dripping and I knew that if I was going to get her out of there I had to keep her calm. I told her the children were safe, that they were up the road with my girlfriend. She calmed down and I managed to cut her out of the seatbelt.

  We discovered that she did have children and they’d been thrown from the car in the crash. They were all right, thank God, and were up the road with another passer-by. It had really shaken us up and even though this was just an exercise, it brought it all flooding back.

  Our victim was unconscious: her lips were blue and she was bleeding from a wound in her back. Though the screaming girl had drawn our attention, this woman was much more seriously injured. We decided we had no choice but to lift her into the pickup and turn back for the checkpoint.

  When the training was over we returned to London with an even stronger sense of the dangers we would be facing on the trip. There was no doubt this was going to be an adventure of a lifetime, but with every adventure there is always an element of risk, and we would be facing more than we’d ever known before. But little did we know that the first genuine accident would take place not at some remote African border, but on a busy street in west London. And it was an accident that could put the whole trip in jeopardy.

  2

  Three’s A Crowd

  EWAN: Just like Charley, I had found that Long Way Round had a very positive effect on my career. These days far more people come up and ask me about the bike trips than they do Star Wars or any of my other movies. Since those four months on the bikes I’ve been very busy: various smaller films but also the third episode of Star Wars, as well as The Island and a stint on the stage in Guys and Dolls. It was whilst rehearsing for the musical that the idea of starting at John O’Groats actually came about. I made a throwaway comment that made it into print, and from then on (whether we liked it or not) we were starting in the north of Scotland.

  Our plans were well advanced now, and Charley and I were sitting in the temporary office we were using in Battersea, just the two of us on the couch, talking about the route, the kind of back-up vehicles we’d use, what modifications we might make to the bikes this time round.

  ‘Charley,’ I said. ‘Eve really wants to come.’

  This wasn’t the first time I’d mentioned it, but I wanted to discuss it properly. Long Way Round had been about Charley and me – this was different again. His smile was wide, mine awkward.<
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  ‘What do you think about it, really?’ I asked him.

  ‘What do I think about it? Well, I suppose I have the same reservations that you do.’ He scratched his neck. ‘I suppose, yeah, I’m open to everything.’ There was another awkward silence. ‘My main concern would be safety. But obviously it changes the dynamic of what we’re doing.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it does. Do you think it’s a terrible idea?’

  ‘Truthfully?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He was laughing. ‘It’s a terrible idea.’

  After we had announced in Dakar that we were definitely doing Long Way Down, we’d followed up with a celebratory meal back at our house in London. Eve had been a little quiet then, and I thought it was just the reality of another long trip, the issues it created at home and the dangers I’d face riding so far once again. But it wasn’t that at all, it was the fact that she had decided that she wanted to join us.

  She told me a few days later; she’d woken up on Sunday morning just knowing she had to be part of it.

  She’d been to Africa before on holiday, but as she pointed out, scuba diving and staying in hotels was hardly the same thing. She’d not seen any of the real Africa and it evoked incredible emotions for her; the landscape, the people, history. She could think of nothing better than camping under star-filled skies or going into villages, meeting people she would never normally meet.

  My first reaction was absolute delight. We’ve been married twelve years, we’re a close family and one of the most difficult things about Long Way Round had been the long separation. Also, Eve told me that if she was able to come she really wanted to ride. I couldn’t believe it: in all our years together she’d hardly been on the back of my bike, let alone expressed an interest in riding herself.

  We didn’t decide for certain of course; it was something I had to discuss with Charley, David and Russ, and overnight all sorts of things began to occur to me. The safety issues, first and foremost; how long Eve would come for, our children. I wasn’t sure how she’d get on with learning to ride or whether she’d have the time to gain the necessary experience. The next morning I spoke to her about it and I suppose, given my initial enthusiasm, it must have looked as though I’d changed my mind.

  I hadn’t. It was just that the realities were beginning to dawn. I really did love the idea of having her along, but we’d been talking about her joining us for six or eight weeks and I started to realise what that would actually mean. I’ve been riding a bike since I was nineteen and on Long Way Round we encountered road conditions that in some areas challenged me to the point of a standstill. Eve hadn’t been involved in that trip and it was hard to convey the sort of situations and challenges we might encounter.

  She wondered if the real reason behind my apparent change of heart was the fact that she might be treading on hallowed ground. And I had to admit there might have been a grain of truth in that. But we have three children and with both of us riding on difficult terrain, in the end it was fundamentally the safety issues that concerned me.

  Anyway, we were on and off the phone all day, pretty abrupt with each other and nothing was resolved, at least not to begin with. Eve told me later that she was thinking: ‘I don’t need him, I’ll plan my own trip; I don’t have to go on his trip, I can go on my own.’

  I ended up being late for lunch and I’m never late for anything. When I arrived I told the others about her wanting to come.

  CHARLEY: I didn’t really think it was a terrible idea. I’d had reservations about the dynamic, of course. One of the reasons I enjoyed Long Way Round so much was because it was just Ewan and me. We’d made it round the world without seriously falling out and I know people who have been on much shorter and less challenging bike trips only to fall out badly, sometimes to the point of never speaking again. Friendships can be fragile things when you’re travelling and if we were to add a new person into the mix, we had to think it through. Logistically, it was not a problem – we just had to work out where she would join us and for how long – but the safety issues were a concern. I brooded about it, mulling it over, wondering how it would affect us and the rest of our trip.

  Of course Ewan and Eve resolved their disagreement. By the end of that Monday they were fine and a couple of weeks later David, Russ and I went round to dinner and the five of us discussed how it might work. David pointed out that even for experienced riders it was a dangerous trip. He suggested that if Eve really wanted to go, we ought to get her a bike so she could clock up some miles. Eve thought it was a good idea, the only sensible way to gain experience, and then she’d know for sure whether or not she could do it.

  In the meantime we located premises on Avonmore Road in West London so we could begin to prepare properly. It was massive, big enough for the bikes, trucks and all the gear we were taking. It was an atmospheric place; it had a real workshop feel with a corrugated iron roof, and red girders where we hung the flags of each country we would be riding through. The roof also leaked.

  We fixed the leak, and kitted the place out. All we needed now were the bikes: JFK and JLO. It turned out that these were the registration suffixes we’d been assigned by the DVLA. A US president and ‘Jenny from the block’: strange or what? They were coming from Germany and I was itching to get working on them, but that Friday afternoon when we left the office, all set to go skiing, JFK and JLO were still in transit.

  3

  Break A Leg

  EWAN: ‘Watch out, mate. Watch out!’

  I clattered into him with my shoulder and flew to the ground, finishing up sprawled on my face. The bike came with me, slamming its full force right into my leg.

  For a moment I just lay there, head to the side, looking up at this guy who was looking down at me with his eyes popping out of his head.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ Still he stood there, arms at his sides, just gawping at me.

  ‘Can you help me get up?’ I asked him.

  He didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. He was in shock. I was in shock.

  Then another guy arrived and picked the bike off my leg. Somehow I staggered to my feet but as I did so I felt something go and a sickening sensation worked through me. I knew I was in trouble and hobbled off the road as quickly as I could. I sat down on the steps leading up to some flats.

  The bloke got my bike to the pavement and settled on its centre stand. He asked me where the key was because on the Lightning it’s not obvious. I had to get up again and limp over to switch off the engine. Back at the steps I stripped off my gloves and helmet. Then I took off my boot.

  My leg was burning, and I could see I’d grazed it quite badly. I could feel a weird sensation just above the ankle: like a sprain maybe, that’s what I was thinking, what I was hoping. I’d twisted something and this was only a sprain.

  Finally the man I’d hit seemed to come to, and he walked over and asked me if I was all right.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I told him. ‘I think I might’ve broken something.’ The words sort of tumbled out and then the possibility struck me. ‘I think I might’ve broken my ankle.’

  ‘No, you couldn’t have.’ Another voice, Scottish, a thick accent belonging to the man whose steps I was sitting on. He’d heard the commotion and had come out to help. ‘You couldn’t have broken it,’ he told me. ‘You wouldn’t be able to walk on it, would you? Not if it was broken.’

  For a moment my spirits lifted. ‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re right. I probably wouldn’t.’

  A policewoman arrived on a horse. Or at least I think she did because the whole thing was happening so fast I was sort of detached. It all felt really surreal.

  She asked if everyone was OK.

  The guy I’d hit was apologising, telling me he’d been looking the other way, that he’d been conscious of oncoming cars.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘so long as you’re OK. I’m fine, I might’ve done something to my ankle but I’m
all right.’ Sitting there I was just delighted he hadn’t been hurt.

  The policewoman asked about a van driver that I didn’t remember; if he was there I don’t think he had anything to do with it. They talked about calling for an ambulance. The guy who owned the flat suggested I come in and have a cup of tea, but all I wanted to do was get home. I didn’t want to go to casualty. I didn’t want to be in the back of an ambulance. I was in shock, but if I could stand I could ride and pulling on my boot I grabbed my helmet and gloves.

  All at once everyone was gone. The policewoman wasn’t there, the guy I’d hit was gone; the other man had disappeared back inside his flat. It all seemed so surreal, as if it was happening around me yet there I was hobbling across the pavement with this weird clicking sensation in my leg.

  Checking the bike I noticed the right hand foot peg was buckled to the point of being vertical, which kind of made it useless but with hindsight it was actually a blessing. It meant I could get my foot fully under the gear shift so I could change gear without having to flex my ankle.

  Somehow I got on and got the bike kick-started. I managed to nudge it into first and then I was in the traffic and completely focused on getting home. Nothing else mattered. Every time I stopped, however, I had to put my foot down. That hurt like hell and I thought: fuck, this is bad.

  Eve thought I was joking when I rang the intercom at home and told her I’d had an accident. I couldn’t get the bike in the garage and needed her to help me. Later she told me that she thought I was making it up and had some sort of surprise for her. I suppose I did, only the surprise wasn’t very pleasant.

  When she opened the door I could see the concern in her face. Eyes wide, she stared at me as I hovered there, half-balanced on one foot.

  ‘Ewan, my God! What happened?’