Actor Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman traversed the globe in Long Way Round. Their next mission—captured in this summer’s documentary Long Way Down—took them from the top to the bottom of South Africa by motorcycle. Here, an exclusive taste of the turf.

McGregor, taking a break from his motorcycling, Simien Mountains, Ethiopia.

When we finished Long Way Round,” says Charley Boorman, son of Deliverance director John Boorman, “Ewan [McGregor] and I went back to our offices and pulled out a map of Africa. I think we had already decided before we came back from our trip that we were going to do Africa.” Says McGregor of their mission, “'One of the things that we wanted to do was to show the true and real side of Africa, all its many faces. We think of famine and we think of wildlife, and Africa’s got everything in between. What we found was that every country had its own identity, and is very, very different from the last.”