I was so suspicious of people. It took me ages to lose that The long way round the interview For actor Ewan McGregor, a global bike odyssey with friend Charley Boorman was a personal journey of discovery. By Beth Pearson

That said, he hasn't ridden it since he returned from his Long Way Round trip with his friend and fellow actor, Charley Boorman. ''I kind of don't want to, in a way,'' he says. Last night he was in a taxi with his wife, Eve, and saw a GS in town and it felt odd. The context was all wrong, and besides, McGregor has a touch of the romantic about him. To ride the GS on mundane A-to-B journeys around London would take the magic away from his epic trip with Boorman.

So McGregor rode his KTM to the Long Way Round headquarters, while Boorman took McGregor's old 748 Ducati. We are sitting around a long table where much of the planning took place. There are laminated maps taped on to the tabletop and cardboard boxes stacked against the walls, scrawled with black marker. A huge map of the northern hemisphere is pinned up on one wall. It's strange seeing the clean red line of the route plotted across the map and the well-worn bikes that have travelled it resting nearby, still showing residues of mud, scrapes and general exposure.

McGregor and Boorman, too, are showing some lasting effects. Both lost weight on the trip: Ewan's jeans are hanging off his backside and Boorman has yet to regain half of the two stone he lost. Other things are less obvious. They arrived in New York on July 29, and Boorman says it already seems like a distant memory, but McGregor's mind is still in-transit. ''I'm amazed how unable I am to deal with the demands that are made on me as an actor,'' he says. ''Not the one I enjoy, which is standing in front of a camera or onstage pretending to be someone else but everything else that comes with it. On the trip I could take each day at a time and go 'okay, today I need to do this, this and this', but I'm unable to do that now. Also, I'm about to work again and I feel like I'm settling back in yet preparing to go away again. I'm finding it all quite difficult, going through paperwork and . . .''

''I was never good at that before I left,'' offers Boorman.

''No,'' agrees McGregor. ''But it's very difficult to keep a cool head. The challenges are different. On the road, the challenges are much bigger. You learn to deal with quite big worries, like whether we'd get across this piece of Mongolia.''

The loose gravel plains of Mongolia did, indeed, bring logistical problems, as did river crossings, mud, bogs and road maps with rather generous road-grading. Yet in the grand tradition of road trips, some of the most testing barriers were psychological. From the moment the pair decided to do the trip, they knew it would be defined by the people they met along the way. What they weren't prepared for was how they would react to the welcome of strangers. ''I'd always be frustrated with myself that I was suspicious of people,'' says McGregor. ''You had to be aware of what was going on around you and who people were or might be, but it was just losing that initial 'what do you want?', you know? It took us ages to lose that. It was a frustrating bit of the journey, the slow realisation that this was something you had to change in yourself.''

Given some of the characters they encountered, their wariness was understandable. Indeed, sometimes it seems as if there are three protagonists to the Long Way Round story: Boorman, McGregor and an unforgettable man named Igor, whom they stayed with in Antratsyt in the Ukraine. Igor, they discovered after accepting his offer of accommodation, was the local mafia chief and lived in a lavish house stocked equally with vodka and Kalashnikovs. At one point, while Boorman was out of the room, McGregor heard gunshots and feared the worst. ''Our night with the mafia was an extraordinary situation,'' says McGregor. ''But it's also just passing by someone at the side of the road when you've stopped to have a fag or a piss. We met a great woman in America at a petrol station. She was about to donate a kidney to her husband and was talking to us about that and suddenly you've got this incredible story

of a woman who is giving part of her body to her husband so he doesn't die and you go 'Oh, isn't life amazing and aren't people amazing', you know.''

''You meet the most extraordinary people,'' picks up Boorman. ''You realise that everybody around the world is pretty much like you are. Everyone wants their children to go to school, to have a job, a roof over their head, feed their children. In places such as Kazakhstan and Mongolia people depend on each other a lot more. We can often be quite detached in the West, with e-mail and telephones, whereas in those countries people rely on each other more. It's lovely because you feel like, although you're a stranger, they respect you as a friend and want to help you.''

Both McGregor and Boorman appear to have been humbled by the people they met, not least by those in situations of extreme poverty. During the trip, they visited the Chernobyl Children's Project with Unicef and both are committed to doing more for the organisation, with McGregor since becoming an ambassador.

''You represent freedom to people,'' he says. ''The sight of us riding in and out in many cases represents freedom that people in those places don't have, whether they just don't have money or a car or it's the small-town mentality where you don't leave. We met a women in Rapid City who'd moved from LA to this beautiful little town and I got the impression she felt stuck there and missed the excitement of LA. To her we represented a freedom she didn't have.''

''No-one's ever satisfied,'' says Boorman. ''No-one's ever satisfied,'' repeats McGregor.

It's moments like these that hint at what the pair will be like in their old age, repeating each other's sentences by way of confirmation, uttering platitudes and reminiscing about the time they set off from London to New York via Eastern Europe and Siberia. They met 10 years ago on a film set and immediately bonded over their well-developed obsession with motorbikes. Boorman fell for them when, at six-years-old, he saw one regularly whoosh past the farm where he grew up in County Wicklow, Ireland. McGregor drove his first 50cc at six, but became an enthusiast when he realised, just shy of 16, that a motorbike might win back the girlfriend he lost to a guy with a 125cc. ''Charley and I just talk about motorbikes all the time,'' says McGregor. ''Our relationship is based around them,'' says Boorman.

''Yeah, if you took the bikes away we'd be like 'who are you? what do you want?','' jokes McGregor. '''So

. . . how's your wife?'''

Although the Long Way Round epic began with an informal discussion in McGregor's kitchen, they agree that anyone who is passionate about motorbikes has to, at some point, undertake a long road trip. When McGregor goes off at a tangent and starts talking about how he's waiting for a couple of bikes to come back from the garage, it seems unquenchable, but then he changes tack. ''It's funny, I'm really starting to think about maybe just riding them on the track. I've seen a couple of really nasty accidents in London recently with bikes, and it's difficult to adjust back to riding in London because we're so used to the open road. It's very dangerous and I'm starting to think about maybe not riding so much in town, I don't know. I've got really into cars, sad to say.''

''F****** hell,'' exclaims Boorman, in actorly mock-drama. ''I don't want to hear it.''

''Yeah, I'm getting quite into cars . . .''

Long Way Round, by Ewan

McGregor and Charley Boorman, Time Warner, (pounds) 18.99.

TOMORROW: What we learned about ourselves.