Race to Dakar Read online

  Race to Dakar

  Charley Boorman

  with Robert Uhlig

  To Doone, Kinvara and Olivia for being there for me.

  Also for Boubacar Diallo and Mohammed Ndaw, two spectators who were tragically killed on the rally. Our hearts go out to their families and friends.

  And Andy Caldecott, who lost his life in this year's rally, and for all those brave riders that fell before him.

  Foreword

  by Ewan McGregor

  We were in an office somewhere, and our book had just been brought into the room. There was real excitement. As we both shut our eyes and covered them with our hands, the copy was placed on a table. Then: ta daa! There it was, and there we were, on the cover, standing proud like two explorers from the past. Our first book. It was a first for both of us, and we smiled huge smiles at each other. 'Wow,' we said.

  'Look at this ... the picture goes all the way round the cover.'

  'Cool.'

  For a while we flicked through in silence, looking at the grouped photos and reading wee bits and pieces. A feeling of pride was swelling in my chest when Charley suddenly said, 'Oh, fuck.'

  'What?' I asked.

  'It says here I'm doing the Dakar in 2006.'

  My best friend Charley has ridden motorbikes since he was seven, which makes him something of a hero in my eyes. His riding has always been really good - whether he was on the track or just going round town - but it was to get better. Much better.

  On the Long Way Round trip I followed his lead through some of the rougher stuff, and it's true to say that we both improved. The terrain that tested us in Kazakhstan would have been a doddle had we faced it later on in Siberia.

  There were times when we both felt pretty good about ourselves. After such stretches the helmets would come off to reveal huge dusty grins and we would relive moments of motorcycling excellence. There was a name that was always mentioned to describe these times. Not to describe the actual techniques of riding on the dirt (certainly not in my case), but the feeling of it. When everything came together, the bike disappeared beneath you and you felt as if you were just flying along, no thoughts or decisions about which line to take, which gear to be in, everything automatic, leaving you free to experience true flow and exhilaration. The Dakar moments.

  Now, I don't know if Charley had actually decided to race in the world's most gruelling rally or not when, in a moment of bravado shortly after arriving in New York, he said to our editor, 'Yeah, I'm doing the Dakar next.' But when he saw it in print on the flyleaf of our book, he more than rose to the challenge.

  Over the following year I saw him change, seeing less and less of him as he threw himself into an extraordinary training schedule. I'd never seen him more driven, so all-consumed by anything before. He truly surprised people with his riding and his passion for this new, terrifying challenge.

  A lot of friends and family - myself included - were nervous and worried for him. The training was really tough, and we all knew about the life-threatening dangers he could face on the rally itself. By the final week before the race, I know that Charley himself was scared too, but he never flinched from the job at hand.

  I was many miles away when the race began in Lisbon in January 2006, but I know that, along with many others, my thoughts and prayers found him, sweating on the start line, engine gunning, his heart beating in his throat. . .

  'GO ON, CHARLEY ... GO ON!'

  Ewan McGregor, July 2006

  PART ONE

  The Road to Lisbon

  Chapter 1

  EARLY DAYS

  It's early in the morning of New Year's Eve and I am climbing into a taxi outside a luxury hotel in Lisbon, feeling strangely calm. The day I've dreamt about for years has finally come and the sheer terror that was paralysing me last night has given way to a calm feeling I've not felt for a long, long time. And I don't know why.

  As usual, Simon is late, but even that doesn't wind me up. I've had a good night's sleep - a miracle considering I was in a blind panic only a few hours ago - and I feel relaxed as we head off to the start.

  The Dakar Rally. Last night I could hardly utter those words without feeling sick. At dinner with my wife, children and friends, the cutlery in my hands was shaking as I struggled to force down some food. I felt like a man facing the firing squad in the morning. But this morning, everything seems to have fallen into place at last.

  Kate Bush plays on the radio as Simon, Matt and I sit in silence, lost in our thoughts as the taxi moves quickly through

  deserted city streets. It feels like any other early morning start. Just like leaving for the airport before a holiday.

  Except we are dressed in several layers of protective motorcycle kit and about to embark on the most hazardous, tortuous, demanding race of all.

  And then it dawns on me. After a year of breaking bones, preparing bikes, chasing sponsors, battling bureaucracy, getting visas and vaccinations sorted, learning to race off-road, finding funding, entering races I feared I would never finish, securing broadcast deals and convincing my teammates that I was up to scratch, at last life has become blissfully simple. No more hassles, just a simple future. Put on my helmet, get on my bike and ride to Dakar.

  Two days earlier, shortly after we arrived in Lisbon, I'd felt that unbeatable feeling as I rode my BMW rally bike to the race compound. Just concentrating on the bike and the road, that sense of completeness I'd found on Long Way Round, travelling around the world with Ewan, came flooding back. There was nowhere else I would rather have been than on that bike - well, maybe in bed with my wife - right then, right there, riding past the ranks of racing trucks, rally cars and the coolest, meanest off-road bikes anyone has ever seen. Fuck! It didn't get any better than that!

  I followed my team mates Simon Pavey and Matt Hall into a petrol station near the Lisbon docks. Shortly after we arrived a squadron of bikes decked in the colours of Repsol, one of the leading teams, arrived. Thrilled to be parking my bike alongside real professional Dakar riders, I watched as Simon chatted to a rider in Repsol kit.

  'Who was that?' I asked when Simon returned.

  Andy Caldecott. Know him from previous Dakars. Nice guy.'

  Like Simon, Caldecott was an Aussie. T thought he wasn't racing this year,' I said.

  'Yeah, said it was a freak thing he's even here. Hadn't been expecting to ride but one of the factory riders got injured. Repsol rang him two weeks ago, just before Christmas. Said would you come and ride on a factory KTM.

  He hadn't been practising or training at all this year, but said yes straight away. Guess that's what Dakar does to you.'

  I knew a little bit about Caldecott - in 2005 he'd won two Dakar stages and come sixth overall - and as I stood there looking at Andy and the other Repsol riders filling up their bikes beside me, I suddenly realised: this is it. For the first time I felt part of the rally.

  We were all about to go into scrutineering, where our bikes would be examined to ensure they were up to race standard, and it would be the same for everyone. That was one of the things that made the Dakar so special. Once it got underway, everyone from the stars to the novices was equal. The stars had massive support and assistance teams, but they still had to fill up their own bikes, get them through scrutineering, ride them on the same tracks

  -and on the marathon stages, repair their bikes themselves - just like everyone else. Eighty trucks, 188 cars and 240 motorcycles were about to start in the world's greatest motor adventure and we were all in the same boat. And watching Caldecott across that petrol station forecourt also made me wonder how I'd wound up in the same race as someone who'd devoted most of their life to racing bikes. After all, less than a year ago I'd never ridden a dirt bike fast and with aggression.

  That night, at
a party held in a Lisbon blues club to celebrate the Race to Dakar team's participation in the rally, my oldest mate reminded me why I was there. Kaz had rung me a few days earlier to say that he, my neighbour Isaac and a couple of other friends were coming down to see me off.

  Twenty-five years ago, Kaz Balinski was a fellow junior bike fanatic who lived across the river from my parents'

  farm in

  County Wicklow. Kaz always had the top gear, whereas I always had the pants stuff. If I'd saved up enough money to buy myself a second-hand bike, Kaz would have the same bike but brand new. And Kaz had the one that I as a twelve-year-old craved more than anything: a motocross track. Kaz and I would race our bikes - his Yamaha YZ-80 and my 125 - around that track every day until long after dark. We'd hang out together in the school holidays, playing cops and robbers on our bikes, tearing across private land that wasn't ours.

  Milling around the house one day, Kaz and I were asked by my mother to dig some potatoes out of the vegetable garden, her pride and joy. Kaz and I rode our bikes a couple of hundred yards down the hill from the house to a walled garden beside the stables, then stared at the long mounds of potato plants with a mixture of apathy and disdain. It was an amazing garden with strawberries, raspberries, rhubarb, tomatoes and berry trees, but as kids we regarded collecting produce from it as a punishment.

  Then I had a brainwave. We could use Kaz's dirt bike, with its big knobbly tyres, to dig out the spuds. Kaz parked his front wheel on the soil, squeezed the front brake slightly and revved the engine so the back wheel would spin furiously while pushing the bike slowly along the trench between the potato plants. After Kaz had tested it I had a turn, riding the length of a row while Kaz stood behind the bike with a basket, trying to catch the spuds as they came flying out of the ground.

  Kaz was covered in mud and the potatoes were gouged with cuts, but we were thrilled with what we thought was an inspired invention. It was only when we presented ourselves and our harvest to my mother that we realised we were in trouble.

  When we weren't riding bikes or wrecking my mother's kitchen garden, Kaz and I would lie in the hay shed, smoking cigarettes and risking a major fire, or we'd hang around the house watching television. One afternoon we sat transfixed by something we'd never seen before. Dozens of motorcycles racing across an empty desert, trailing long plumes of Saharan dust in their wake. It was the first year of the Paris-Dakar rally.

  In 1977 a French motorcyclist called Thierry Sabine got lost in the Libyan desert competing in the Abidjan-Nice rally, the first African rally. After a few days Sabine was rescued and airlifted to civilisation, but the desert had made a deep impression on him and he vowed to set up his own desert rally. The next year, 170 competitors set off from the Place du Trocadero for Dakar. Riding via Algeria, Niger, Mali and Upper Volta then through Senegal, the best of them reached Dakar a fortnight later. It was a huge success.

  The event grew every year until Thierry Sabine died in a helicopter crash during the 1986 rally. Thierry's father Gilbert took over the running of the Dakar, but it somehow lost its lustre. By 1993 the number of entrants had dwindled from a peak of 603 bikes, cars and trucks to just 154 vehicles. The Amaury Sport Organisation, organiser of the Tour de France, the Paris Marathon and more than a dozen other sports events, took over. ASO

  then built up the rally into one of the world's largest sports events.

  Over the years, I watched the Dakar on television whenever I could. At first it was the four-wheel-drive trucks pounding through the sand that fascinated me, these ten-ton behemoths racing so fast and with so much power they went airborne over the sand dunes. But my fascination for the trucks was soon overtaken by the cars and, more than anything, the bikes.

  I was hooked and whenever anyone mentioned the Dakar I'd recognise a kindred spirit. By the time I was in my mid-teens, I'd vowed to compete in the Dakar one day, although I suspected that, like many adolescent yearnings, it would remain no more than a distant dream.

  Whenever I got the chance I'd speak to bikers who had taken part. They all said the same thing: it's the toughest race in the world. That put the fear of God into me, but it also made me want to do it even more. It wasn't just the race, hard as it was. It was all the preparation that went into it. Most bikers spent years getting ready for it, earning their stripes in enduro races and desert rallies until the day came when they felt there was only one challenge left to face, until they had no choice but to enter the Dakar. Even then, they'd spend another six months to a year raising funds, sorting the paperwork, polishing their technique in sand dunes and getting their bike ready. Just getting to the start was a major achievement.

  Riders who had 'done the Dakar' would tell me that no one could understand the rally until they'd competed in it. It wasn't just the distance and the physical demands. It was the mental strength needed to keep pushing when stuck in the middle of nowhere, exhausted and dejected. It was the drive to ignore that desperation to give up when there were 250 miles to ride across soft sand in darkness.

  Dakar riders said the rally took you to the worst and best places you'd ever been - and most of them were in your head. It was a rollercoaster ride from the biggest highs to the deepest lows.

  Like me, Kaz knew all that as we knocked back the beers at the party in Lisbon. With Simon nearby, matching some Scottish bikers drink for drink just thirty hours before the start because 'you can't let a couple of Scots drink an Aussie under the table,' I asked Kaz why he'd come all the way to Lisbon.

  'To see you, Charley,' Kaz said. 'To wish you on your way.'

  'But you could have said goodbye in London.'

  Kaz looked me in the eye. T came because I thought I might not see you again. A lot of people die doing the Dakar.

  And, whatever happens, you'll come back a different person.'

  My life felt like it had come full circle in the years since Kaz and I scrambled around the Wicklow mountains on our bikes and became obsessed by the Dakar rally. And now the biggest challenge I'd ever faced was less than forty hours away.

  As the son of a film director, I had an unconventional and, occasionally, glamorous early life. By the age of five I'd appeared in a Hollywood movie, sitting on a sofa behind Jon Voight in one of the final scenes of Deliverance.

  Over the next decade I appeared in several other films directed or produced by my father, including Excalibur, my first proper acting role, Nemo and The Emerald Forest, in which I was chosen for the lead by a group of producers and studio executives who did not know I was the director's son.

  The Emerald Forest was a huge success. Suddenly people were recognising me in the street and I was flying all over the world for premieres, promotion and press junkets. I moved to Los Angeles but the offers I thought would come rolling in failed to materialise. After six months I moved back to London, where I bumped into Olly, a girl who had recently split up with a mate of mine called Ian. As soon as she walked into the room my mouth dropped open. She is gorgeous, I thought. Although I didn't have a clue about proper romance, I could tell Olly need a good old-fashioned courtship if I was to convince her that I was the right kind of guy. For months, we circled each other.

  We hadn't even kissed, but I felt completely in love and didn't want to blow it. After a few months of what seemed like the most protracted courtship on record, we went on holiday to Spain with some friends. Aided by the sun and Sangria, Olly and I got it together. I was twenty years old and felt like I'd hit the jackpot. Nineteen years later, married with two daughters, I still feel the same.

  I moved in with Olly shortly after we got back from Spain and continued to make films and television shows, but each one was less distinguished than its predecessor. Even now I can't remember some of their names. By the mid-1990s I was making at most one film a year, keeping afloat by starting up a building and decorating business with a friend. In 1996, Doone, my first daughter, was born. Kinvara, her sister, was born the next year. From that point on, leaving my family at home to make films beca
me even less appealing, but I still missed the adventure, the travelling and the money I'd tasted as a younger man.

  In 19971 got a part in a film that would eventually change my life. The part was relatively small - I was credited simply as Secretary - and the film was not a great success, but the actor playing the lead part in Serpent's Kiss was a fellow bike nut called Ewan McGregor. Ewan and I built a great friendship around our love of bikes and our families - we both had two daughters of similar ages - and when, a few years later, Ewan suggested riding two bikes around the world from London to New York, I leapt at the chance. Olly recognised it was a once in a lifetime opportunity and immediately said I should join Ewan. The only problem was that I couldn't afford it. But as we talked late into the night about the trip and thought about our wives' suggestions that we should keep a journal to remember it, the idea occurred to us that maybe we could finance the trip by filming it. And, with a production team on board, we'd have someone to help us with the bureaucracy - something at which we, as actors, were not particularly adept.

  Gradually we pulled the trip together and in April 2004 set off from Shepherd's Bush. When the trip was underway I took some convincing that it would be a success. I was worried that we'd be seen as a couple of wanky actors poncing around on bikes. Even when we'd crossed Siberia I still felt there was some truth to that view. Before we set off from London I felt convinced that the trip wouldn't change me in the slightest. I didn't believe travel broadened the mind and I certainly didn't believe riding a bike from London to New York would change my life one little bit. Once it was over, I told myself, it would be back to building and decorating, with a film thrown in every few years if I was lucky.

  I couldn't have been more wrong. After finishing Long Way Round, Ewan went straight back to his day job as a film star. No big change there. But Long Way Round taught me that a lot of things are possible if you believe in yourself and as we were approaching New York I was already hatching plans to avoid going back to my old life.