Long Way Up

This is Apple TV+'s first attempt at a documentary styled adventure travel show, and they've certainly gone big with it by taking on the Long Way franchise. The show features actor Ewan McGregor and his friend, Charley Boorman, going on a three-month, 13,000-mile motorcycle trip. Filmed in the fall of 2019, they ride through South America, Central America and Mexico, before finishing up in Los Angeles. The first episode starts slowly but held my attention with Ewan's wonderful, down-to-earth personality. I became even more interested when Harley Davidson stepped up with two prototype, electric "adventure bikes" for Ewan and Charley to take with them on their journey. For the bored and stuck at home, the EV aficionado and the lover of motorbike road trips the series holds a lot of promise, as the two venture through the Andes, Central American rainforests and back to California on fully electric motorcycles, demonstrating innovative engineering ingenuity and filling our empty, wanderlusting hearts with the opportunity to accompany them from our sofas while we wait out the pandemic.

Ewan and Charlie make an entertaining double act and the old production gang comes back together for a new road trip. The most obvious question, though is, "why didn't anyone tell them batteries don't like the cold"?

It seems that it takes them about 2 weeks to work this out. Whoever did the logistics must have been evilly laughing as they seemed to be constantly 10 miles short of powe.

Anyway, I'm about half way in now and in it for the long haul. The scenery is great (the drone pilot was pretty busy and seems to have his/her own battery supply) and the miles soon disappear.

And at least the charging issue gives a bit of jeopardy for the show. Worth a watch.

The idea of using electric bikes seemed nice in the beginning but it turn out to be a problem and a boring one as they always were trying to fin a charging point. Seems electric bikes are still a long way to go before they become mainstream in motorcycling. Claudio didn't even use one!, he was on a HD sporter I think. The constant searching for a way to charge became really annoying for viewers in my opinion and prevented them from seeing parts of chile and argentina that were "too far" from a charging point. Also the issue with the range was annoying, 140 miles a day is not really much for such a long trip, I imagine how bored they were most of the day waiting for the bikes to charge. The speed was kind of ludicrous too, riding most of the time at 40 miles per hour to preserve charge in the batteries.

I must state that my favorites documentaries in order is LWR and LWD. It's a series that actually impacted my life it ended up with north of 800k miles on generations of R1100 and 1200GSes. Simply put my life would have been different. The same impact as Ted Simon had on Charley and Ewan.

I really wanted to love this season, I've been waiting for it, I needed it!

But once I've watched 9/10 of the episodes it never hooked me it's like food without salt. You watch it but you don't crave it. What's missing is the humans the remoteness the struggle and not the least the roughness in the way it's visualized. I cannot connect to this season. I guess it's become.very "Hollywood" and orchestrated. There's to much technology that's get in way of the journey. And this is not the way Ted Simons intended it with ".. the interruptions makes the journey". It feels here that technology gets in the way of the journey, cultures and people. To many cities and hotels. Finally the inner stress in both Charley and Ewan. They do not feel so excited anymore.

I'm sorry I never write these reviews. But this series is too close to my heart.

I get the feeling that a lot of the 'bad' reviews have a) never seen the other installments and b) are easily bored. I am *loving* this. They're all driving completely new, prototype machines that have never been driven over such terrain or distances before, learning about them as they go. I think it's so cool that HD and Rivira were able to come up with road-worthy prototypes on such short notice.

The scenery is *fantastic*! Otherworldly. I have never seen such gorgeous views, it's great. And it's so awesome to see Ewan and Charley together again!

Complaints about it being 'scripted' are silly - it was filmed on the fly. Complaints about it being 'too green'....? Get a grip.

An excellent show so far (up to ep six), and I cannot wait to see more of the incredible Americas from the back of a bike!