Stranded on Mars
Travel is an intricate part of what it means to be on the Race. You can always tell when I’m traveling. Typically I have my scrub bottoms on (like doctor scrubs), some random t-shirt covered by my trusty red and black flannel. Covering my head is my unbleached, sweat stained Patagonia hat, with my very big noise cancelling headphones over my ears. Around my neck is my cross and St. Michael medal (these never leave my neck) and in addition to those is probably my blue eye-mask, ready for a nap at a moments notice. My eyes are typically sunken from the extreme lack of sleep, and my hair is greasy hinting that the last time I had a shower probably wasn’t in the last 4 days. Yes, travel isn’t very glamorous, yet I love to gloat about the really crappy, stressful, exhausting travel days. So for my self-pity and self-promotion here are what my travel days have looked like so far on my race.
For me my first travel days started in Georgia. We left the hotel at launch at around 4 am, drove 18 hours by bus to New York. We stayed in some pretty sketchy hotels, got on a plane the next morning, and flew 7 hours to Portugal. We had an 18 hour layover there so we got to get out and explore the city. We went back to the airport late at night, and waited for our flight to Romania. After landing in Bucharest, Romania, I think somewhere around 6 am, we boarded a public bus that we had to stand in, with Romanians and 40 world racers, for what felt like an hour. After the bus, we waited for a train to take us to Dragonesti. The ride alone took about 4-5 hours. In total my very first travel day took roughly 96 hours and I made it through all on about 9 hours of sleep.
My second set of travel days is probably one of my least glamorous travel days. First, we took the same train that we took to Dragonesti back to Bucharest. There, we took bus (again full of 40 world racers) to a the city of Trunavisti in Ukraine. From there the squad separated into groups. My group had both my team and Humbly United on it and we took one of the longest rougher roads all the way to Rivne. On the way I got hit with some serious sickness. (Trigger warning) I’m talking flat out projectile vomiting and I wasn’t off the bus either. It hit at least four of the people on the bus and a lot of people’s stuff. The bad news is I only had Tortillas, water and Nutella for my travel days so needless to say I won’t ever be having Nutella, ever again, in my life. This was about only halfway to our ministry site. For the rest of the bus ride, I made the driver stop 4 more times so I could throw up on the side of the road. Then,after that, I didn’t have anything else to throw up so I dry heaved into a plastic bag about 8 more times. By the end of the ride I was laying flat of the floor of a cold bumpy bus rolled up in the blanket that belonged to the bus driver. I wore only shorts, socks, a t-shirt and my raincoat. My shoes had been filled with vomit, my pants were also covered in vomit and my shirt too. The clothes I was wearing were the only clean clothes I had left.
I arrived at my ministry house around, I think, 9 o’clock. I remember walking in not saying hello but asking if there was hot water (I meant for the shower), my host said no but I will make some (she meant to drink with tea), so without saying anything else I walked to the bathroom and sat on the toilet for an hour as my body got rid of everything else in it. I shivered for 3 days after and was probably dehydrated for 2 of those days, but never had to go the the hospital.
My third set of travel days actually starts with a vacation we took to Poland. We traveled from Rivne to Lviv where we were going to meet our squad for travel to Chile. We arrived several days early to drop off our big packs (we didn’t need to take all of our stuff to Poland with us). We traveled from Lviv to Krakow by bus. Around midnight we arrived at the Polish, Ukrainian border. There we sat for 4 hours (to this day I still do not now why). We finally arrived in Krakow about 6 am. We spent 2 full days in Krakow (one being the day that we arrived). The first day we explored all of the city, and went to adoration at the Sanctuary of Divine Mercy. The second day we got up really early to make it to a bus that would get us to Auschwitz. Myself and two of my teammates took a 6 hour long walking tour of Auschwitz. We got back to Krakow around 10ish, bought food for the next bit of travel and went to bed around 12. We got up around 4am to take a bus from Krakow back to Lviv. While in Lviv, we met up with the squad again, spent a night there and got up early once again to get to the Lviv airport. From that Airport we flew to Kiev (the capital of Ukraine). We had a 9 hour layover there and flew into Istanbul, Turkey. We spent less than 2 hours in that airport before we took a 14 hour flight to Colombia. Again, we spent a short time in that airport before we finally flew to Santiago, Chile. In total we spent 24 full hours just in the air. From Santiago we took a bus to Los Andes, about an hour away from Santiago. There we had our Leadership Development Weekend (LDW). After two full days in Los Andes my team and Humbly United (we are with them a lot) drove back to Santiago, and Uber-ed from the bus station to our ministry house.
Travel is hard and it is exhausting, but none of these travel days compare to my travel from Santiago, Chile to Cusco, Peru.
We began our journey to Cusco at 10 o’clock in the same bus station that we arrived in when we first got to Chile. There, we met up with the rest of the squad. After everyone exchanged their “hello’s” we walked half an hour (with our big packs) to a different bus station. Once there, we got on a bus that was supposed to take us 30 hours to Arica, Chile (really close to the border). We planned on taking another bus that would get us just past the border. Once we got across, we had plans to take two more buses before finally arriving in Cusco. None of this happened. In fact, while on that first bus (the 30 hour one) we broke down in the middle of the Chilean dessert for 14 hours. I actually had a great time in the dessert. I got to have some good introvert time and also got to spend some good time in prayer. Being stranded in that dessert though made me think I was on a different planet. It got really cold there though and we were forced to stay on the bus during the night. Around 12ish Colby got sick and threw up on the bus, thankfully most everyone was asleep and no one freaked out too bad. Imanaged to get some sleep and was woken up at 6:30 am by someone telling me that a new bus had come to pick us up. We only took that bus half way before we got on a different bus that got us to Arica. Because we missed our connecting bus in Arica we had to improvise. We took 10 different cars for 40 racers across the border into Peru. We met up again in Peru to take another bus that would get us all the way to Cusco. All was going well until we started driving in the mountains. We got stuck in a nasty hail storm which caused the roof of our bus to leak. It rained on us for the last 3 hour of our bus ride. After we got into Cusco we took buses to our hostel. We walked into our hostel at 11pm. In the end, this travel day took 74 hours. Although I managed to stay away from sickness we had a lot of people go to the hospital. Several with altitude sickness (Cusco is the most populous city at it’s altitude of 11,000 feet), a couple had salmonella (we think from the food we got during our overnighter in the desert), and some with strep throat.
In total, I think we are at 12 full days of travel. Travel days are a badge of honor on the race. To say that you survived customs, layovers, no knee room, boredom, poor sleeping conditions, early bus rides, travel diarrhea, motion sickness, dirt roads, hundreds of miles, and not showering for 5 days in a row is something to be proud of. Travel will be one of those things that I will never forget about this race. Although it sucks, it is always so much fun. We get to talk with people who we haven’t seen for weeks. We get to see parts of countries you wouldn’t otherwise get to see if you were taking direct flights. Travel is a lot and often so overwhelming, but it’s oh so worth it.
