Read a feature story from TIME Magazine on the Gobi March, highlighting the Unlimited Potential race team’s work to support Save the Children:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1828101,00.html

Read a feature article from the Seattle Times profiling the Unlimited Potential team’s efforts in the Gobi March:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoft/2008062982_gobi21.html

Watch a video interview from ABC News Now’s “Ahead of the Curve” featuring Orlando Ayala discussing Microsoft Unlimited Potential’s investments in China prior to the Gobi March:

Check out a final video from Seattle’s Fox Q13, showing the Unlimited Potential team arriving at SEA-TAC, greeted by friends and family:

Hi again. Peter Galli here.  While I blogged on behalf of Team Unlimited Potential during the recent Gobi March, I now want to share with you some of my experiences as part of the media team.

While the race team was wending its way across the desert in the blistering heat, the media team was bumping our way across the same terrain in a 4 X 4 vehicle, whose only air-conditioning was the open windows.

Our job was to be at the various checkpoints along the route each day, to support, welcome and chat to the racers about their experiences and feelings.

But, much of the time, we simply became part of the amazing  team of volunteers, which also included three Microsoft staffers – Roxanne Seubert, Josh Nash and Camilla Buttery – and the incredible medical team lead by Dr. Brian Krabak.

That role involved helping fill water bottles, getting backpacks on and off, taking pictures, and generally making sure the contestants felt well taken care of.

But, getting there, meant braving some treacherous terrain and having our vital organs rattled and banged around for hours on end, day after day.

Also, we were repeatedly stopped by local police, who questioned our drivers, peered at our dusty faces through the open windows, and scanned our luggage. I never did get an explanation as to why these happened

The media team, a truly happy-go-lucky group, consisted of two videographers, Evangeline Majawat of Malaysia’s New Straits Times, Rebecca Byerly of CNN (who also ran the race!), two reporters for Racing The Planet, an official race photographer, and me.

Often I waited for the team to come in for the night, catching an exhausted Debby en route to bed or Orlando in the medical tent having his feet doctored or William making dinner at the fire pit, to get a synopsis of their day and its highs and lows.

Even though the team had often walked for 12 or more hours in the sweltering heat and with all their supplies on their backs, they always greeted me with a smile and hug, had something positive to say, and were never once cranky or too tired to talk.

Once all the other press interviews, video and picture editing was done for the day,  we faced the next challenge:  finding a local Internet café – remember this was rural China after all – with the bandwidth necessary to handle all the huge video and image files we needed to upload.

I was amazed by the fact that there were cafes in all-but-one of the towns we passed through, though many of them were well of the beaten path, so having a local guide and driver sure helped with finding them. 

But the entire process was a logistical challenge. The easiest route was to have one of the many policemen assigned to keeping an eye on the race accompany us into town and get us machines.

The police were also not always available and/or willing to do this, which meant the process became far more complex.  On those days, once we had found a café, we, as Westerners, had to hand over our passports for registration before we were allowed to go online.

Getting online was another challenge, with all the Windows XP menus, commands and questions appearing  in Chinese, and a shortage of English-letter keyboards. Once all that was resolved, we had a variety of folk come over and stand behind us, watching everything we were doing on the screen.

While some of them were clearly just intrigued with our video and pics – and had probably not seen many Westeners before - others could have been police or secret service.

This was partly due to the fact that the country was in lock-down mode ahead of the Olympics, and the torch was expected to pass through the region any day, but it was pretty disconcerting.

Given the volume of data we were trying to push through the system, we were usually there for at least four hours, struggling to upload photographs and videos, and update and edit our blogs.

That was followed by a mad race through the pitch black, dusty streets of whatever city we happened to be in, back to the overnight camp.

But the one day that is most etched in my memory is when we spent more than two hours looking for an Internet café which, we later found out, did not even exist. Our driver decided to stop at the local police station and ask where it was.

That proved not to be the best decision, and resulted in much yelling between him and the police captain, who insisted on escorting us back to the overnight camp.

So there we were, travelling like a presidential cavalcade, with sirens screaming and any unfortunate local on their scooter, bike or donkey cart, unceremoniously forced to the side of the road as we swept by in a cloud of dust.

Once we had reached the camp and the captain’s fears were assuaged, we were allowed to head back to town to find that the so-called Internet café consisted of one cable and one working PC. Unable to upload more than a few photos, we headed back to camp.

Much to my surprise there was cell phone reception at the camp, but only on the elevated dirt road that led to the site. So there I was, at 2am Chinese time, in the complete dark, with nothing but the light strapped to my head, cell phone pressed to my ear, walking up and down the road to ensure connectivity, and reading from my notepad. This was true reporting from the field – a very, very remote field.

Every now and then, I would see a speck of light, far in the distance, which grew ever closer. The distant sound of a banging drum signaled that this was indeed a racer, coming in to the home stretch; true beacons in the dark.