Finding Gobi

by Dion Leonard

  The more we looked into it, the more we discovered that Lucja had been right about the costs and complexities of bringing a dog to the UK, but we’d underestimated how hard it would be to get Gobi out. In a battle for which country could wrap up the problem in the most amount of red tape, it looked like China was going to win.

  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.

  It started with a single notification. Someone I’d never heard of had just donated twenty-five pounds. A few minutes passed, then came another message, telling me someone else I’d never heard of had given the same amount. After a few more minutes, there was another. Then another. Then someone gave a hundred pounds.

  I was astounded and even a little confused. Was this real?

  A few more pings and a few more minutes passed, and I checked on the Internet to see whether the article in the paper was also on the Daily Mirror site. It was there all right, and in the few hours that it had been live, it had been shared and liked by hundreds of people.

  I’d never imagined anything like this could happen.

  The online version of the article described the story as the “Heartwarming bond between ultra-marathon man and the stray dog he refuses to leave behind”.1 Something happened in me when I read those words. I’d known all along that my heart had been warmed by Gobi and that I refused to leave her behind, but I’d not used th
ose words with the journalist. It was his description, and the fact that he had seen the significance of my meeting Gobi in much the same way that I did was encouraging.

  Maybe that’s why people are making these donations, I thought. Maybe they see what he saw too.

  Twenty-four hours after the piece came out in the paper, the crowdfunding page showed that the £5,000 target had been met. But it didn’t stop there. People kept on giving, all of them strangers to Lucja and me, all of them somehow moved by the story of this little dog who for some unknown reason chose me and wouldn’t give up.

  As well as constant updates about the donations, my phone started to pop with messages from other journalists. Some of them messaged me through the crowdfunding site, others through social media or LinkedIn. It was hard to keep track of them all, but I wanted to get back to every one of them.

  The UK papers contacted me first—another tabloid, then a couple of the mainstream papers. I suspected that the approach the journalists took would vary from paper to paper, that perhaps they might want to know about different aspects to the story. But they were all happy to ask the same questions: Why were you running in China? How did you meet Gobi? How far did Gobi run? When did you decide to bring Gobi home? Will you run with her again?

  The first time I heard that last question, it made me stop. I realized that in all the busyness and planning, I’d never thought about what life would be like when Gobi came home to Edinburgh. Would she expect twenty-five-mile walks each day? How would she cope with city living? And if I did ever run with her again, would she stick to my side as she had before, or would she want to head off by herself into this strange new world with all its distractions?

  There was so much I didn’t know about Gobi’s past, and there was so much I didn’t know about our future together. I guess that’s what makes the start of all relationships so exciting—even the ones with scruffy stray dogs.

  After I’d had a few interviews with different newspapers, I got a message from someone at the BBC. Phil Williams wanted to interview me for his show on Radio 5 Live later that night, and even though I was starting to feel a bit tired from all the talking, no way was I going to turn him down.

  The interview turned out to be the best thing I could do at the time. The producers combined the audio of my interview with video footage they’d managed to get from the race. The little one-minute video was more popular than I think even they imagined. Before long it had been viewed 14 million times, making it the second-most-viewed video on the BBC site.

  After that, things really took off.

  I did interviews with other BBC shows and stations; then the TV people started calling. I spoke with other channels in the UK, then ones in Germany, Russia, and Australia. I got on Skype and did interviews with CNN, ESPN (where Gobi’s story was in the top-ten plays of the day), Fox News, ABC, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Huffington Post, Reuters, the New York Times, and podcasts, including the Eric Zane Show, which, in turn, gave the story a boost to a whole other level.

  All along, the total on the crowdfunding page just kept rising. People from all over the world—Australia, India, Venezuela, Brazil, Thailand, South Africa, Ghana, Cambodia, and even North Korea—pledged to give what they could to the cause. Their generosity was humbling as well as exciting. I’d been to some of these places, and I knew the kinds of lives a lot of the people in them lived.

  Within the space of a few days, everything had changed for Lucja and me. We’d been a little unsure about whether to do the crowdfunding and felt aware of just how big a challenge it was going to be to get Gobi home. In the space of twenty-four hours, nearly all of that concern was wiped out. Having Kiki’s support and getting so many pledges from people meant that we knew beyond doubt that the biggest obstacles had been taken care of: we had the expertise to get her back and the funds to make it happen. Everything seemed to be falling into place.

  Almost everything.

  Nurali wasn’t answering any of our e-mails.

  12

  “I just don’t see it, Lucja. I don’t see how it’s going to happen.”

  We were lying in bed, waiting for the alarm, having our first conversation of the day, but the words had an eerie familiarity about them. I’d said the same thing many times in the week that had passed since the Daily Mirror article came out. While the crowdfunding page was up to almost £20,000, all we were getting from Nurali was silence.

  Every time Lucja and I talked like this, I had tried my best to explain what I knew of Nurali and Urumqi. I had told her how the city was this crazy, busy place, and everyone there was rushing around doing their stuff. “Nurali thrives on being busy, so I can’t imagine she’s sitting at home with her feet up. She’s probably got a hundred other projects going on, and there’s no way she’s going to take time off to help us. Looking after a little dog has got to be way down her list of priorities.”

  “So we need to remind her that this matters. We need her to remember how important this is, don’t we?” said Lucja.

  I remembered the night of the sandstorm. “Nurali’s one of those people who won’t help if she thinks you’re being a pain. If we stress her out, I reckon she’ll go even slower just to piss us off.”

  We sat in silence for a while.

  “Do you think she’s seen all this stuff on Facebook?”

  There was no way that would have happened. With no Facebook or Twitter making it into China, and almost no Western news channels on TV, I couldn’t imagine how any of the buzz we were experiencing had made it back there.

  “So what do we do?”

  Silence settled on the room again. The conversation always came undone at this point. We were stuck, unable to get out. We were powerless to make anything happen. We could do nothing other than wait.

  Even though Nurali was silent, the rest of the world was not. Along with Kiki’s e-mails asking if we still wanted her to help, we started to see an increasing number of comments on the Facebook page asking for updates. People, rightly so, were wondering what was going on. They wanted to know how the process of getting Gobi ready to travel was going and when she was coming home. They wanted photos, video, and news.

  I couldn’t blame them. If I’d have given money to a cause like that, I’d feel the same way. I’d want to know the dog was being looked after and the owners were acting diligently and responsibly. I’d want evidence that everything was moving forward. I’d want to know the whole thing wasn’t a scam.

  Though Lucja and I were desperate to provide people with the reassurance they wanted, we couldn’t do it. All we could do was post vague messages about how everything was in hand and we were taking the first steps in what was going to be a long, long journey. We rationed our news and photos the way we rationed our food on a long desert stage.

  A few more days slipped by, and still we received no response from Nurali. I could tell that Kiki was finding all this waiting a bit frustrating, but she clearly understood the unique nature of the challenge ahead of us. She offered to e-mail Nurali herself, and we gladly agreed. Hopefully the fact that Kiki was Chinese would solve any language and cultural problems.

  The supporters, on the other hand, were getting more vocal, and more and more requests for information were being made. I began to worry that if we didn’t come up with some concrete news soon, the huge wave of positive support might back away from us. Worse still, people might turn against us. So I decided to call one of the race organizers.

  “This is a big deal now,” I told her. “It’s not just me who cares about bringing Gobi back; it’s gone global. It feels like thousands and thousands of people are watching and wanting to know what’s going on. The ones who have donated are like shareholders, and they want answers.”

  She listened and told me that she understood. “I’ll make it happen,” she said.

  When the call ended, I felt a weight fall from me. If the race organizers were going to get involved, we’d be fine. They masterminded a whole series of races that took p
lace on four different continents; surely they could get a little dog reunited with her master.

  Sure enough, Kiki got an e-mail from Nurali a week later. Everything was fine, though Nurali did agree that there was a lot more to be done than she had first anticipated. She and Kiki agreed that Nurali would keep on looking after Gobi, but that Kiki would send someone out to Urumqi to take care of everything that needed to be done before Gobi could fly back to Beijing.

  This was good news. But the process was taking so much longer than either Lucja or I had hoped. What mattered most was that Gobi was safe, Nurali was still taking care of her, and Kiki would soon have someone in Urumqi putting the plan into action.

  Nurali even e-mailed some pictures, and we were able to give the supporters a full progress update. It did the trick and answered most of the questions people had. The press inquiries kept on coming, and I spoke with magazine journalists for the first time as well as more radio stations.

  For the first time since arriving home from China, I felt truly confident that everything was going to work out.

  The next week, however, I started to get nervous. Nurali had gone silent again. It was so frustrating. Two weeks had dragged by since we launched the crowdfunding site, and we were no closer to getting Gobi the medical care and tests she needed to begin the process of flying her back home.

  I e-mailed the race organizer again to see if she could help, but instead of getting a reply from her, I received one from her office. They said she was in America, as was Nurali. They wrote that Gobi was being looked after and that Nurali would be back in China in a few days and all was good. They passed on a message saying that the organizer planned on talking everything through with Nurali when they were together.

  Lucja and I didn’t know what to think. We were a bit annoyed that it was going to be yet another week until Kiki could get someone out to see Nurali and get things moving, but we had known there could be speed bumps along the way. And who knew, maybe Nurali would catch some of the coverage of the story when she was in America and get a clearer picture for herself of how much attention Gobi was getting.