Two motorbikes, one continent, eighty-five days. Long Way Down followed Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman from John o’ Groats at the top of Scotland to Cape Agulhas at the southern tip of Africa — 24,400 kilometres through eighteen countries, most of them with no reliable fuel, a few of them at war, and one of them (Ethiopia) at the time hosting both an active drought and the worst diesel adulteration on the continent. The series aired in 2008. We watched it when it first dropped on Australian television and we still go back to it most years.
For the Geography Scout relaunch we sent Beckett Lang back through every episode, route map and behind-the-scenes interview to write up what made the trip work and what we’d want anyone planning their own version to know. Beckett’s done two of his own long-overland rides — Darwin to Adelaide on a DR650 and a much shorter London-to-Athens on a borrowed BMW — so he had opinions before we started. Most of them survived a re-watch.
The Route: London to Cape Town the Hard Way
The headline figure was 24,400 km, but the route choice told you who was making the decisions. McGregor, Boorman and producer Russ Malkin could have run France-to-Spain-to-Morocco-to-the-west-coast — sealed roads almost the whole way, no political problem, no logistical catastrophes. Instead they chose the eastern corridor: down through Italy, ferry to Tunisia, across the top of Libya, into Egypt, south through Sudan, into Ethiopia, then Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia and finally South Africa. Most of that route can’t be done now. Libya isn’t realistically rideable; the Sudan-Ethiopia border has been intermittently closed; northern Kenya remains a security headache.
What 2008 caught was a narrow window when most of those borders were friendly to a film crew with the right paperwork and a satellite phone. The Foreign & Commonwealth Office at the time still rated parts of the route as “essential travel only,” and the BBC’s risk assessment ran to several hundred pages. Boorman has said in subsequent interviews that two of the seven planned border crossings were genuinely uncertain until the day they happened.
Why the BMW R1200GS Adventure Was the Right Bike
The bike choice has been argued over ever since. Both riders rode BMW R1200GS Adventures with the long-range fuel tank (33 litres), heated grips, and a TKC80 dual-sport tyre fitment for most of the route. The third rider, cameraman Claudio von Planta, ran the same setup so the spares list stayed manageable. Critics have pointed out that a smaller bike — a DR650, a KLR650, an XT660 — would have been lighter, more nimble in deep sand, and infinitely cheaper to repair on the road. Beckett’s view, which we agree with, is that the GSAs were the right choice for this trip: long days, sealed roads more often than not, two-up loads with crew kit, and access to BMW’s continent-spanning dealer network in case of structural failure.
Where the GSAs struggled was exactly where you’d expect: Sudan’s deep sand south of Dongola, the volcanic basalt of northern Kenya, and the corrugated dirt of the Botswana cut-line. McGregor went down twice in the Sudanese sand and Boorman dropped his bike at least four times. Each fall took two riders and a film crew to lift a 260kg loaded bike out of a soft-sand hole. There’s a candid scene late in the series where Boorman — a former pro motocross racer — admits the bikes are “twenty kilos too heavy for what we’re asking them to do.” That was honest, and it’s the right takeaway for anyone planning an overland.
Ethiopia: The Episode Everyone Remembers
The Ethiopian leg is the one our team’s notes kept circling back to. The country had absorbed the riders into a different kind of travel altogether — slower, more hospitable, more beautiful, and considerably harder. The crew rode into the Simien Mountains at altitude (over 4,000 m), came down into the Lalibela rock-hewn churches, sat with priests inside structures cut whole from the bedrock in the 12th century, and then continued south into the Rift Valley.
The UNICEF segments — the trip was partly a fundraiser for UNICEF’s African programmes — were filmed mostly in Ethiopia and northern Kenya. McGregor has spoken about the Mekele orphanage visit as the moment the trip stopped being about the bikes. We agree. The series gives you space to feel that shift without preaching about it, which is harder to pull off than most travel TV credits itself for.
The Logistics: How a 12-Person Crew Crossed Africa
What the series largely played down — and what makes it possible to watch as a viewer rather than a planner — is the support operation. Two custom Mitsubishi support trucks carried fuel, spares, medical kit, communications, food, and water. A two-person medical team travelled with the convoy after Egypt. The production secured fixers in every country and had standing arrangements with embassies for emergency extraction if any of the three riders went down hard.
It’s tempting to read this as cheating — “real” overland riders don’t have a chase truck — but Beckett’s view is that the support operation is what made the show watchable rather than merely existent. Without it, McGregor and Boorman would have spent most of every day fixing bikes and finding fuel rather than seeing the continent. The riding-in-the-truck scenes (when one of the riders was unwell or the bike was being repaired) are useful reminders that even with all that backup, Africa runs you down.
What “Long Way Down” Got Right About Travel TV
The reason Long Way Down still holds up — and why we keep recommending it to people who say they want to ride somewhere ambitious — is that it doesn’t pretend the journey is the destination. There are days when the riders are tired, frustrated, missing home, getting on each other’s nerves. McGregor and Boorman are old friends, which gives the show a different texture than most “two strangers thrown together” reality formats. They argue, they patch it up, they ride on. That texture is the show.
The other thing it got right was scale. The country segments were long enough that you actually noticed the change between Sudan and Ethiopia, between Kenya and Tanzania. Most travel TV cuts a continent into a 22-minute highlight reel; Long Way Down gave each country room to be itself. Sienna pointed out, on her re-watch, that the Malawi segment alone runs 18 minutes — most travel shows wouldn’t give Malawi 18 seconds — and you come away with a real sense of why people who’ve been to Malawi remember it forever.
Routes You Could Still Ride Today (and Routes You Can’t)
A reasonable amount of the original route is now off-limits. Libya hasn’t been rideable for civilians since 2011. Sudan has been intermittently closed and is currently in the middle of an active civil war. Ethiopia’s Tigray region remains uncertain. Kenya’s northern frontier has had ongoing security incidents. That removes the entire London-to-Nairobi land corridor as practical for an independent rider.
What is still doable: the southern half. Cape Town to Nairobi via Botswana, Zambia, Tanzania and Kenya is a magnificent overland in its own right, and infrastructure has improved in most of those countries since 2008. The trans-African route from West Africa down through Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon and into Angola is also mostly possible, though Cameroon and the DRC are difficult and require careful planning. For most of our readers we’d recommend starting with Cape Town to Victoria Falls — about 2,500 km, achievable in three weeks, and an honest sample of what the bigger trip felt like.
The Bikes, Now
The R1200GS Adventure has become the R1300GS Adventure, and the platform has refined itself in every direction. Lighter where it could be (about 12 kg saved over the 2008 spec), better in deep sand thanks to the new ride-mode programming, and more comfortable two-up. If we were planning the trip today, we’d still consider a GS — but we’d also seriously look at the KTM 890 Adventure R, the Honda Africa Twin Adventure Sports, and the new Triumph Tiger 900 Rally Pro. All of them are 30+ kg lighter than the BMW and considerably better in the kind of off-road that broke ankles in Long Way Down.
The bigger lesson from re-watching the show fifteen years on is that the bike matters less than the planning. McGregor and Boorman could have ridden Honda CT110 postie bikes from London to Cape Town and made it (slowly) — what they couldn’t have done was film it without the support operation. If your trip is “two friends and the road,” choose a bike you can lift on your own, plan your fuel range conservatively, and budget twice as much time as you think you need. That’s still the lesson.
Where to Watch It Now
Distribution rights have moved around since the original 2008 broadcast. Long Way Down is currently available on Apple TV+ alongside the prequel Long Way Round (2004) and the electric-motorcycle sequel Long Way Up (2020). The whole trilogy is worth the watch. If you can only fit one in, our team’s vote is unanimously for Long Way Down: the route is the most ambitious, the production found its rhythm, and Africa rewards the slower pacing more than South America did. Marlowe also pointed out — and we’d second this — that it’s the best of the three for showing what the support crew actually does, which is part of what makes the trip honest rather than mythic.
