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Doing it with a film crew and a back-up truck isn't really adventure touring, is it? Not for me, anyway. The trip to the bottom of Africa done the proper way can be read in Johnny Bealby's beautiful and romantic book 'Running With The Moon', while Andres Carlstein's 'Odyssey to Ushuaia' covers the South American trip. But we'll wait and see - perhaps McGregor and Boorman can surprise us.

 

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Re: What is in the water today???

Now, that's interesting...because to me it seemed the other way round, with the book revealing far more than the DVD did. What really annoyed me in the book, though, apart from MacGregor mentioning how much he missed his missus on almost every page, was the ridiculous amount of kit he took with him, as detailed in the appendix. Finding glorious isolation in the Mongolian steppes but looking at it while plugged in to your iPod is just plain wrong. You need to enter into the world of where you are, not view it like some giant movie. The DVD, at least in its early sections, seemed to show nothing more than how determined they were to put none of their own money into it, and how they expected to be given things (like bikes!) for free; and no matter how punishing the roads in Kazakhstan were, it was hard to believe in their suffering when you knew there were two big 4X4s, a guy with a camera, and a guy with a sound boom just out of shot. " ...Cut! Take five, everybody, that's good...drinks for everyone, please?..." The only bit where I felt the DVD got into its stride - and where Ewan and Charlie had really come to terms with what they were doing - was the crossing of the rivers before Magadan. As for the charity aspect, let's just say that it was, erm, transparent, and leave it like that, shall we?