A biography for Charley Boormanhasn’t been written yet.
“We all live in a very tranquil, sanitised world where you're told to do everything, and when you travel, it's very liberating not to be in that crazy, nannied state.”
“If you say to people, 'I'm off to Papa New Guinea,' you'll often get a bad reaction - usually from people who've never been there. There's this fear of the unknown. And 99% of the time, you end up surprised - it rekindles your faith in humanity.”
“I got that sense of travel and adventure from my father.”
“There's a symmetry of blissfulness about Mongolia. It was a real privilege to be there.”
“I'm competitive but I'm not butch.”
“The experience of riding an electric bike is very different. Because there was no engine noise and no big vibration coming from the bike, it wasn't as stressful.”
“I was a child actor in 'Deliverance,' but not the banjo player. It was my dad's big movie as a director, and at the very end there's a scene where Jon Voight comes home to his wife. I played his young son.”
“There's a whole culture now where you meet travellers who don't give you a scrap of paper with their address on it, they give their GPS coordinates. 'I've seen this amazing place in Malawi you've got to go to! I'll give you the coordinates!'”
“Ewan McGregor and I travelled 20,000 miles from London to New York by bike. It was incredible.”
“If you look back as far as the first explorers, they all took with them the latest gadget.”
“You hear stories about the horror crashes of the Dakar Rally, which is a long 16-day race, and about people getting lost in the desert, and they're all true. Every 20 minutes, you were just about to crash. Bikes, cars and trucks all race at the same time.”
“I don't read when I'm travelling.”
“When you ride electric bikes, you know the terrain that you're riding on becomes a factor and headwinds become a factor. Then there is tailwinds, which is behind you... it makes such a difference going downhill and stuff like that.”
“Dad was a tough cookie. He expected a lot from people when they were employed to do a job. If they don't do it properly there's not much time for pampering. He came from making films like 'Deliverance' and 'Point Blank.' He was renowned for taking on tough movies. He revels in that kind of thing and people feed off that enthusiasm.”
“I had a wonderful childhood, looking back on it.”
“At the time when I was going to school in Ireland people didn't really have a clue about what it was, so I had to spend a lot of my time trying to explain to teachers what dyslexia meant.”
“All kids love bikes and cars. But there was a guy in my local village, Tony, who gave me a go on a bike. My first proper motorbike was when I was about 12, but I'd ridden on his and he was the one who really got me into bikes.”
“Ewan McGregor and I ate a lot of strange things on our motorcycle journey around the world, but the strangest had to be a meal we had in Mongolia.”
“I suppose all the things I've done have been different.”
“Mongolia was unbelievable. Great parts of it are completely untouched by modern development, but the roads, when you could even call them that, were terrible and we'd find ourselves on the wrong route without any warning.”