Round-the-World Irish Biker
Ciaran O’Reilly on his Beemer at Tierra Del Fuego— South America’s fiery “End of the Earth”
“I first met Ciarán O’Reilly in the 1970’s in New York, when he was, as they say, “just off the boat” from County Cavan, Ireland. It was in the early days of An Claidheamh Soluis/The Irish Arts Center and its nascent theatre company, housed in Hell’s Kitchen in an old building on West 52nd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues in Manhattan. The IAC was an exciting mecca for anyone interested in Ireland’s traditional theatre, dance and music, attracting Irish actors like Ciarán and blarney pilgrims like me, who wanted to learn the tin whistle and the Irish harp.
Ciarán’s natural talent for acting manifested in performances at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, on Broadway, in TV and movies and lead him to found the wildly successful Irish Repertory Theatre with Charlotte Moore. But Neil Hickey wrote in the March-April 2019 issue of Irish America Magazine that Ciarán ‘s most outrageous performance was in his 20’s when he starred in a solo motorbike trip around the world.
Yes! Certainly one of the most entertaining evenings of my life was not in a theatre, but having Ciarán share some of his memories—and photographs—of that insane adventure in the safety of the living room of his Manhattan apartment. I wrote about it for my Innocents Abroad travel column in the Montreal Gazette.
”
Irish actor spins around the world on his BMW
"HERE'S graffiti you won't see in New York," Ciarán O'Reilly said as he adjusted the focus on his slide projector. "Lord knows how this photo got mixed in with South America. I took it in the Australian outback near Coober Pedy or no, wait, it was in the desert outside Damascus."
"Don't spit - You might need it!"
Thirst, hunger, bandits, sandstorms, crashes and concussions, altitude sickness, charging bull-camels, hypothermia, hijackings, border intrigues, dirt-clogged bearings - my intrepid friend had met them all while solo motorcycling around the world. Ciarán tries to live by the words of the the 18th-century English poet William Cowper: How much a dunce that has been set to roam excels a dunce that has stayed at home. And he tries not to cross "the thin line between high adventure and stupidity" too often. But being Irish and an actor thriving on drama, it's not easy.
Every so often, performing in New York's Irish Repertory Theatre (which he founded with Charlotte Moore in 1988, and which just produced Yeats: A Celebration with Mia Farrow and Katharine Hepburn) gets to be just too tame. So Ciarán hops on the old Beemer and strikes off for exotic landscapes and cliff-hanging scrapes that Indiana Jones, James Bond, Jules Verne, Lawrence of Arabia and the Belgian cartoonist Hergé’s hero Tintin would admire.
This boyishly handsome County Cavan lad doesn't look like he'd scream "Go ahead, shoot me!" at a troop of Jordanian soldiers aiming submachine guns at him in the Gulf of Aqaba. But put Ciarán O’Reilly in black-leather jacket and pants and give him a switchblade and he can look ferocious. When he strolls through Rio de Janeiro, Ciarán casually parts his hair with his knife to ward off would-be muggers armed with hypodermic syringes. But muggers are only one kind of travel hazard.
There was the time outside Ankara when he hit a Turkish pothole and his headlight flew off and sank into a swamp. Countries away from any BMW service, Ciarán stripped to his jockey shorts, tied a rope around his waist, fastened the rope to a tree, then fished around in the dank dark muck, until he caught - a headlight!
Another time, while riding on a dirt track in the broiling Australian outback, he hit a sand ridge. Lying there in the heat, smothered in black leather, in the middle of God's nowhere, trapped under 500 pounds of bike with gasoline pouring over his leg and vultures circling overhead, Ciarán perversely thought what a tough chew his leather pants would make.
"I don't know where I got the superhuman strength to lift the bike," he said. "It was an Aboriginal god's feat of magic."
Wild slide show
These days when "adventure travel" means packaged safaris, organized wild elephant rides, and Bedouin desert nights with four-star toilets, my friend is one of a dying breed. Yet he's so modest about his brazen adventures, if it weren't for his photos, I'd hardly believe he'd scaled the Himalayan heights, crossed the Argentine Pampas from the Atlantic coast to the Andean foothills, and outwitted border guards in war-torn countries - always alone.
It was getting late, and the bottle comically labelled "Cheap Red Wine" I'd bought as a joke was still sitting on Ciarán’s kitchen table undrained. But he was eager to show me all the photos of his recent five-month South American odyssey from New York to the tip of Cape Horn, and I was eager to see them.
Ciarán kept apologizing for the curious order of the slides, which appeared to have been dumped in a box, shaken like a bunch of raffle tickets and then flung into the slide carousel. One minute we were admiring a banana market in Mexico, then a Costa Rican parrot, then crossing the storm-tossed Straits of Magellan separating South America from Tierra del Fuego. Then we were in Patagonia, then riding under a waterfall in a boulder-strewn Guatemalan river, then back in the Andes.
Mummies
With a peculiarly odd regularity—as if to snap me awake—every dozen or so slides, the image of a mummy would appear. But these weren't like the Egyptian mummies I’d seen at the Cairo Museum, all tidily wrapped in linen doused with fragrant unguents. These were grotesque, desiccated human bodies with gaping mouths with horrifying expressions. Unwrapped bodies exposed to show the ribcages, bones, skulls all covered with thin desert-dried skin. Nightmarishly, the bodies seemed to be captured in the agony of death.
“I was fascinated by this mummy museum in Mexico - El Museo de las Momias de Guanajuato," Ciarán explained. "These mummies weren’t discovered by an archaeologist, but they were poor souls evicted from their graveyard. From 1865 to around 1958 families were required to pay a “grave tax” to keep their deceased at peace in the cemetery. If the relatives were behind on their grave tax, these cadavers were dug up and stored in an underground ossuary, in case the relatives coughed up the money for a reburial. In the late 1800’s they ran out of space in the ossuary and dug up the bodies to store them somewhere else. But instead of skeletons, they found mummified bodies, and decided to make a mummy museum—underneath the graveyard!"
"The dead bodies never got back into the ground?"
"It's an ongoing project," Ciarán said. "After three years in the graveyard, if your family can't pay the plot rent in perpetuity, they dig you up and display you in a glass case. Isn't that the pits? The last mummy was someone buried in 1973, and put in the museum in 1990. There's over 300 mummies, sitting, standing, dressed, undressed. There's even newborn mummy the size of an Irish soda bread loaf, and a pregnant mummy. The mummy-to-be who never became a mummy, mummy."
"Good Lord."
"Yeah, it's grotesque. Some of the mummies look like they're screaming, and I think it's because they heard the curator coming, and screamed, ‘Oh no, not the mummy museum!'''
Desperate for a masseuse
If Ciarán showed me slides of the Baños Calores in Rio Hondo, Argentina, I don't remember. All I remember is that he told me that whenever his back went out, as it sometimes did on those long jackhammer, roller-coaster motorbike rides, he had to get a massage. The closest one turned out to be 400 kilometres away.
"The joke was on me, Nancy,” Ciarán said. “I'd heard about these hot mineral baths when I was in Jujuy, south of Bolivia. All the way to Rio Hondo I was imagining this gorgeous Oriental masseuse in a bikini cooing into my ear. When I got to Rio Hondo, I felt ridiculous. It's like a retirement village - everybody there's over 70 or 80. Here I was all hunched over, and one old guy nearly knocked me down on his skateboard. At the ‘massage parlor’ I was handed over to a brawny matron with a Russian accent who pounded me and kept burping up liver and onions in my ear."
Talk show celebrity
Ciarán had worked on learning Spanish for this trip, putting on headphones and a language tape the moment he exited the New York City's Holland Tunnel. But by the time he got to Buenos Aires where he was invited to go on the Oprah-Winfrey-of-Argentina TV talk shows, all he could muster was broken English.
"I rode my BMW onto the TV set, and the talk show host Nacha Quévara told the audience I'd ridden the motorbike all the way from New York City, just to be on her show. And well, I did, of course," he said with a wink.
