I hope this wasn’t intentional or that someone wasn’t behind this. Forgive my suspicion, but I don’t understand how this could happen! Gobi’s story went global, and I just hope someone (not Dion) isn’t trying to make money off taking her. Missing for days, and you were just notified?
The comments did make a good point. Thousands of people around the world were following the story, and the crowdfunding total was visible to all. Was it hard to imagine someone trying to make some easy money by dognapping Gobi and hoping we’d pay a reward for her safe return?
I was supposed to be working, and I tried my best to get on with the reports I had to write, but it was hard going. I must have spent most of the day distracted by all these thoughts and questions. I felt like a feather in a storm: powerless and at the mercy of forces far, far stronger than me. By the time Lucja came home from work, I was exhausted.
She’d been following the feedback throughout the day, and while I had been sidetracked by the posts that looked for someone to blame, she’d been struck by the ones that tried to find a solution: Can you fly there to look? She’ll feel you and find you! Please use the funds to keep her safe until she flies home with you. This is devastating.
She is looking for you. Heartbreaking. I am praying she is found safe. I don’t think anyone would think twice if you used some of that crowdfunding money to offer a reward for her safe return. Has this been put out to the media outlets to get the word out?
I’d been home for six weeks and had about the same amount of time left before going to another 155-mile race in the Atacama Desert in Chile that October. I’d not picked up any injuries in China, and I’d been able to resume my training almost as soon as I got home. I was convinced that I was going to be in the best possible condition to go out and win Atacama, especially now that I knew some of the runners I was going to be up against, such as Tommy and Julian. And if I won Atacama, I’d go to Marathon des Sables in 2017, ready to score a top-twenty place. In the whole history of the race, no Australian had ever finished higher.
Making a sudden trip to China to search for a lost dog was not part of my training plan. Six weeks out from Atacama, I should have been clocking one hundred miles a week on the treadmill in my improvised homemade sauna. Instead, I was doing nothing. All my training had fallen away as the search for Gobi overtook my life.
Putting Atacama aside, I had other good reasons for not going back to China. I’d hardly been at my best at work in the previous weeks, and asking for even more vacation time without giving my employers any notice would be pushing their goodwill to the absolute max. If I were in their position, I knew exactly what I’d say.
And if I did go, what could I honestly hope to achieve? I couldn’t speak the language, I couldn’t read Chinese, or whatever version of Arabic it was that I’d seen in Urumqi, and I had even less experience searching for lost dogs than the woman who was leading the search. If I went, I’d be wasting their time as well as mine.
In the end it didn’t take long for me to change my mind. It wasn’t that all my doubts were suddenly answered or that I had a profound sense that if I went, I’d find Gobi. I decided to go because of a simple, compelling fact I shared with Lucja late on the second night after I’d been told Gobi was missing: “If I don’t go, and we never find her, I don’t think I’d ever be able to live with myself.”
And so it was that I found myself sitting by a departure gate in the Edinburgh airport, ready to embark on a three-flight, thirty-plus-hour journey back to Urumqi. I snapped a photo of my flight itinerary and posted it online. With so many people being kind and generous in the previous days, I wanted them to know I was doing all I could to help.
Only four days had passed since the phone call, but I flew with the knowledge that the people who had given so generously to help bring Gobi home wanted me to go back and find her. We had set up a second crowdfunding site, called Finding Gobi, to pay for my travel as well as the costs that the search party was already incurring—printing, gas, drivers, staff, and food. As with the Bring Gobi Home site, people’s generosity had left both Lucja and me speechless. We smashed our target of ￡5,000 within the first couple of days.
I went with the blessing of my boss as well. When I’d started to tell him that Gobi had gone missing, he didn’t wait for me to finish. “Just go,” he said. “Find the dog. Sort it out. Take whatever time you need.”
As for Atacama, that was the one problem to which I couldn’t find a solution. I knew that going back to China would be pushing my time-off allowance at work and meant cancelling my plans to race in Chile, but I decided there was no use worrying about it. If I lost Atacama but found Gobi, all would be worthwhile.
I boarded and checked Facebook one final time. Dozens of messages had come in, all of them full of encouragement, positivity, and good faith. Many of the comments said the same thing: these people were praying for a miracle.
I agreed. That was exactly what we needed. Nothing less would do.
Somewhere in the sleepless fog of the all-night flight, the story of Cliff Young came into my mind again.
Like me, he had no idea that he was going to cause such a stir when he ambled up to the start line in 1983. I’m guessing he didn’t have a clue that he was going to win it either. But he knew he could make the distance. Experience, self-belief, and a little bit of not knowing what he was up against all helped give him the confidence he needed.
Was I going to find Gobi? I didn’t know. Was I going to be able to do what people suggested and get the local media to cover the story? I didn’t know that either. Did I have any experience of ever having done anything like this before? None at all.
But I knew I had the heart for the fight. I knew my desire to find Gobi was as strong as any desire I’d ever had within me. Whatever it took, I knew I wasn’t going to rest until there was nowhere left to search.
14
Ten minutes after we drove away from the airport, I finally worked out what I didn’t like about Urumqi. I’d been too distracted to notice when I came through the city as I’d been travelling to and from the race, but as I sat in the back of Lu Xin’s car next to the translator, I listened to her explain the reasons why every street light and bridge was covered with closed-circuit TV cameras. I finally understood. Urumqi felt oppressive. It felt dangerous. In an odd way, it reminded me of living in the hostel in Warwick when I was fifteen. The threat of violence was all around, and I felt powerless to defend myself.
According to my translator, Urumqi is a model for how the Chinese state tackles political unrest and ethnic tensions. There’s a history of violence between the indigenous Uighur people, who practise Sunni Islam and who see themselves as separate from mainstream China, and the Han Chinese people, who have been encouraged by the Chinese state to migrate into the area with the incentive of tax breaks.