By Any Means: His Brand New Adventure From Wicklow to Wollongong by Charley Boorman Page A

down; the buildings with that stark, Soviet influence Ewan and I had seen on Long Way Round.
    The pitted, bumpy roads weren’t good either, and the weather was horrendous, the rain lashing down. It was hard to see properly and I only just missed a pedestrian who stepped out from behind a lorry. At last I got my bearings, sorted out my position and we rode out into the grey, wet countryside.
    The Ural was never known for its speed, and soon we had trucks overtaking so close we were almost forced into the trees.
    ‘Hey, Charley,’ Russ yelled from the sidecar. ‘I asked Nick what the Georgians would think of two guys hurtling across country on a Russian military motorcycle.’
    ‘What did he say?’
    ‘That we’d be OK so long as we weren’t packing a Kalashnikov.’ Black clouds hung low and dreary over the mountains, the trees dripped water and the potholes filled with rain. I could feel my suitcase jiggling around on the rack and Russ was telling me the sidecar had no suspension.
    This was absolutely nothing like Turkey. I’ve noticed before that each border crossing is different, and it takes time to acclimatise. This was weird though; it was so like the Russia I’d seen it was incredible.
    Climbing the hills we were at last overtaking the slower traffic while I tried to make sense of the steering: the bike juddered a bit under braking and I got one right-hander completely wrong. The rain was coming in almost horizontally and visibility was down. I overcooked the bend, missed the steering and swung viciously across the road.
    ‘Whoa!’ Russ cried out from the sidecar.
    ‘Sorry, mate, sorry.’ I got the bike back on line and wagged my head. ‘Fucked that up, didn’t I? Thank God nothing was coming or we’d have been squashed tomatoes.’
    We stopped off to meet some of Nick’s friends who lived in a small house with narrow doors that opened on to a large living area. They couldn’t have been more hospitable, feeding us meat, strong cheese and a sort of vegetable curry. Through Nick, they asked us about the expedition. We told them how far we’d come and how far we were going. We told them our fears about Iran and getting into China and they wished us the best of luck. They were like people the world over, happy to open their doors and welcome us, to feed us and show us pictures of their families.
    Outside again, I got the bike going while Russ called London.
    ‘Everything all right?’ I asked, when he came off the phone.
    ‘We won’t know for sure until we get to Baku. We keep getting told different stories. Thursday morning we’ll have to get straight down to the embassy. It’ll be a fiasco, I can see it already.’
    ‘Have a little faith.’
    ‘Faith: right, sure. I tell you what, Charley, I’ll believe we’ll get the visas when I see the stamp in my passport.’
    I felt for Russ - it was easy for me to trust in faith while he and the team back home organised everything. We were on the road because we loved it, a couple of mates trying to get to Australia by any means we could. But we were also filming, and although we were doing a lot on the hoof, circumstances change all the time and there was no way we could leave everything to chance.
    That night we stopped in a town called Kutaisi. While I took a shower Russ wandered down to the River Rioni. It was here that Jason and the Argonauts were said to have sailed in search of the Golden Fleece. Standing on the stone bridge, Russ thought the river current looked far too vicious, but that’s how the story went. According to the legend, Jason sailed up the Bosporus from Greece and across the Black Sea to Georgia. It is only a legend, of course, but then most legends have some basis in truth. And even to this day miners use sheep’s fleeces to attract the gold from their pans, which is one of the many theories of where the idea of a golden fleece came from.
     
    The next morning was still overcast, rain spattering the puddles, and it didn’t make