Every pet-moving service we e-mailed came back with the same answer: no. Some of them didn’t elaborate, but from the ones that did, we began to understand the full depth of the problem.
In order for Gobi to leave China, she would need a blood test; then she’d have to wait thirty days before being allowed to fly out of either Beijing or Shanghai. Simple enough, perhaps, but getting her on a plane out of Urumqi meant that she first had to undergo a health check by a vet, get a microchip, and have official approval from someone, somewhere, in the Chinese government. Oh, and there was one more thing: to fly from Urumqi to Beijing or Shanghai, Gobi had to be accompanied by the person who was taking her out of the country.
“Any chance of Nurali doing all that?” said Lucja.
“I couldn’t get her to put up my tent in the sandstorm. There’s no way she’d do all that.”
“Could we get someone to drive her to Beijing?”
A few minutes on Google and the answer was clear. A thirty-five-hour, eighteen-hundred-mile drive across mountains, deserts, and who-knows-what-else wasn’t much of a Plan B.
After a week of getting nothing but rejection e-mails from pet transport companies, a chink of light emerged. A woman named Kiki e-mailed Lucja back, saying that her company, WorldCare Pet, might be able to help, but only if we could persuade Nurali to carry out some of the essential medical work. I hoped for the best and went ahead and asked.
To my surprise as well as my gratitude, Nurali e-mailed right back. Yes, she could get Gobi seen by the vet, and yes, she could make sure Gobi had all the right tests Kiki’s company required. She’d even go ahead and buy a crate so that Gobi could fly in the hold.
This was the best possible outcome.
But Gobi’s move wouldn’t be cheap. Kiki estimated that it would cost a minimum of ￡5,000 for her to get Gobi back to the UK, and we’d figured out that we’d end up spending another ￡1,500 on quarantine and a whole lot more on travel to and from London to visit Gobi.
Bringing Gobi to our home would cost a lot of money, and we needed to think hard about whether we could do it. Part of me wanted to pay for everything ourselves, not out of pride or anything like that, but simply because bringing Gobi back was something that I—and now Lucja—wanted to do for Gobi’s sake as well as our own. We weren’t bringing Gobi back as an act of charity or a show of great kindness. We were bringing her back because, strange as it might sound, she was already a part of the family. And when it comes to family, you don’t count the cost.
As much as all that was true, I wanted to be realistic. If anything went wrong at any point, we both knew that the total could easily exceed ￡10,000. When I’d told people at the end of the race that I wanted to bring Gobi home, Allen, Richard, and quite a few other runners had all said they wanted to help and would make a donation. In the days after I got home, I received more than a few e-mails from competitors at the race, asking how they could give money to the Gobi fund. I knew that Gobi’s courage and determination had touched many people, so it wasn’t surprising that they’d want to hand over a few pounds to help make sure that she had a good, safe life ahead of her.
So Lucja and I sat at the computer and set up a crowdfunding page. When it came to putting in a target, we both paused.
“What do you think?” she said.
“How about this?” I said, typing in “￡5,000” on the form. “We’d never get it, but it’s probably the most realistic estimate of how much it’s going to cost to get her here.”
“And if we get only a few hundred pounds, it’ll help.”
Over the next twenty-four hours, my phone chirped a few times to tell me that a handful of donations had come in. I was grateful for each and every gift from my fellow runners, knowing that even a few pounds given here and there made the task ahead a little bit easier. More than the money, however, I loved reading the comments people wrote. Helping Gobi made them happy. I hadn’t quite expected that.
I also didn’t expect the phone call Lucja received on the second day after the crowdfunding page went live. The guy introduced himself as a journalist and said he’d seen the crowdfunding page and asked to speak to me. He explained how he’d found Lucja’s number on her site that promotes her as a running coach. It felt a bit weird to know that a stranger could track us down like that, but when he explained why he was calling, I was intrigued.
He wanted to interview me and write an exclusive feature about Gobi for his newspaper, the Daily Mirror.
Journalists from papers such as his don’t always have the best reputation. A few years earlier the Daily Mirror, along with several other papers, had been caught up in a phone-hacking scandal, and trust was still low. But the guy sounded genuine enough, so I decided to say yes and see what would happen. At the very least, it might be fun to post it on Facebook and get a few more people reaching for their wallets.
Before the call ended, the journalist reminded me that it was an exclusive and that he was concerned I might talk to other journalists and give them the story before he had a chance to publish.
“Mate,” I said, then laughed. “You can do what you like with the story; no one else is going to care about it.”
We did the interview by phone the next day. He wanted to know all about the race and how I’d met Gobi, how far she’d run with me, and how I was hoping to bring her back. I answered all the questions, and though I was a little bit nervous at first, I felt okay with how the interview went.
I didn’t know whether to be anxious or excited when I went to buy a copy of the paper the following day. I skimmed through the pages, wondering what I was going to find.
What I didn’t expect was a full page with great photos from the race and a really good write-up. But that’s what I saw, sitting beneath the bold headline: “I Will Not Desert My Ultra-Marathon Pal.” The journalist got all the facts right, and he even had a quote from the race founder, who said, “Gobi really became the race’s mascot—she embodied the same fighting spirit as the competitors.” I liked that.
I’d been in a paper before, when I finished sixth in my first ultra, and I’d had a few mentions on race blogs and in a few running magazines, but this was a whole other level. It was weird but in a good way, and I quickly put messages up on the crowdfunding site, Facebook, and anywhere else I could think of. I thought it would be a pretty good encouragement for anyone who had already made a donation.
I had checked the crowdfunding page as I went to pick up the paper that morning. It was at almost ￡1,000, with about six or seven people having donated. An hour after I put the paper down and started making my third coffee of the morning, something amazing happened.
My phone went wild.