Leisure
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photo by Nick Kozak
Travel
Extraordinary Fund-raising Adventure
21.12.2007
On 29th November Slovenia saw the arrival a traveller with a slightly different agenda to the norm. 24-year old Kris Mole, of Brighton, England, is currently on a fund-raising mission for Cancer Research. Back in October he set himself the challenge of visiting every mainland EU Capital City without having a single penny in his pocket.
To make matters more difficult, he isn’t allowed to receive any cash along his way, he can only rely on the kindness of strangers to provide him with the food, water, and shelter that he needs. When it comes to travelling between destinations, he found out quite early that he wasn’t the world’s best hitch-hiker, so decided that the best way to get from A to B is to jump on trains with no ticket and then see how far he can get before being thrown off in the middle of nowhere. He set off on 1st November and so far this gutsy (or in his own words, stupid) traveller has made it from his starting point of Stockholm, to Oslo (he knows it’s not EU but he ended up there by pure chance), Copenhagen, Berlin, Warsaw, Bratislava, Vienna, and Ljubljana. At the time of writing, he was planning his path into Rome.
All fundraising is done through his website where he also tries to keep the readers updated with tales of his adventures. He’s building up quite a following in his home country, thanks to having his story picked up by many newspapers and even the BBC who regularly interview him by phone for their live radio broadcasts.
Kris is no stranger to Slovenia, he lived in Ljubljana for 3 years, leaving just last December. During that time he even contributed a few articles to The Slovenia Times.
When telling the story of how he managed to get for free from Austria to Slovenia, he said on his website
»And so I was in Slovenia. It felt good straight away. After the 3 and a half years I spent living here, it always still feels like coming home.« Many people reading this may be wondering why someone would deliberately put themselves in a position of such poverty. Kris explains on his website that after spending the past 4 years taking, it was time to give something back. When he was putting his final plans together, his aunt with whom he was very close, Susan, was in hospital fighting cancer, and he was overcome with a strong desire to do something to help the cause. He set up the website and also the fundraising page, and saw little interest at the start. Then as he started his journey and his stories appeared on the website, things just took off and the sponsorships started picking up rapidly.
So far on the journey there have been some tough times. He found himself thrown off of a train in Germany near to the Polish border, and had to walk to Poland. He then got lost in the Polish forest, trying to find the motorway. He got a strain of Salmonella in Warsaw.
He found himself in Austria in a strange village near to the Slovenian border and again decided to walk along the motorway into Slovenia.
There have been times when he’s gone days without food.
But then there have been the positives that come with such a challenge. In every place he found himself he’s met amazing people who have helped him. He’s seen the sponsorship money going up. He’s been back to his beloved Slovenia, where there was no shortage of food or friends willing to spoil him. He’s visited places he’d never even heard of before. And he’s also learning the whole time more about himself, and also about what it’s like for those less fortunate than himself. People who haven’t chosen to be homeless and without money for a few months, but who have had it forced upon them by circumstances beyond their control. People who can’t just make an emergency call to family if things get too out of control, and ask for help getting back to a warm home with a fridge full of food.
Kris’ aunty Susan lost her fight to cancer on 9th November. That gave a whole new sense of meaning to Kris, who has stated on his website that he will sooner die in the cold somewhere in Eastern Europe than go home to England without completing his mission.
He’s trying to build up as much awareness of what he’s doing as possible, so if you have a spare few minutes whilst sitting at your computer, take the time to have a read of his adventures at www.euro-challenge.blogspot.com