Ewan McGregor & Charley Boorman

Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman are actors whose Long Way Round — a memoir of their motorcycle journey from London to New York via Eastern Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Alaska, and Canada — became a bestselling adventure travel account.

Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman embarked on a motorcycle journey in 2004, riding from London east through Europe, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Siberia, then across the Bering Strait by plane and south through Alaska and Canada to New York — approximately 19,000 miles in 115 days. Long Way Round (2004) is the book of that journey, written from the diaries both men kept alongside producer Russ Maloney.

The journey was simultaneously a personal adventure and a media production: a documentary film crew traveled with them, the series aired on Channel 5 and Bravo, and the book was published as a companion. This makes it different from traditional solo travel writing — the presence of cameras and support crews, the planned media aspects — but it does not diminish the genuine experience of the journey, which included genuine hardship in some of the most remote terrain on earth.

The appeal of the book is the combination of celebrity openness and authentic adventure. McGregor and Boorman write about their fears, their equipment failures, their disputes, and their physical exhaustion with enough honesty that the experience feels real rather than curated. Long Way Down (2007), the companion account of their journey from Scotland through Africa to Cape Town, followed the same format. Both books are primarily read by motorcycle enthusiasts and adventure travel readers.