USD Magazine Summer 2010

DAY 27

DAY 39

“I have a lot of limitations.

The backpacker lifestyle doesn’t have any limitations.”

whole emotional experience,” Pandza says. There are plenty of other moments. Shelley talks fondly of the professional rugby player he met in New Zealand, Lucas Gibson. After giving him a place to stay in his home for the night, Gibson took Shelly out on his boat with a group of friends the next day and introduced him to one of the country’s native shell- fish, the Greenshell muscle. The encounter was caught on tape and will likely be in the final cut of the film. “Do you want to eat it Drew, or … ?” Gibson trails off; they stand on the deck of his boat. He shows Shelley the mus- sel, still in its shell, fresh out of the water — and very raw. He’d just taken a bite of one himself, but Shelley was hesitant. “Uh, I’ll eat a cooked one,” he said. “But I don’t know about a raw

one …What do they taste like?” Gibson laughed. Finally, Shelley acquiesced. He took the mussel and bit down. It tasted awful. A moment later, his face showed it. “Aww, nice,” Gibson said, laughing. “Chew it!” one of his friends shouted. When he planned the trip, Shelley never thought he’d end up eating raw fish just pulled out of the water by a rising New Zealand rugby star, but it was the kind of experience he’d hoped for — a sort of instant kinship with people who viewed the world the way he did. It was, wrapped up in just that small moment, one of the big reasons he decided go in the first place. Duprel and Pandza say that was something they didn’t fully understood until they saw it for themselves.

And despite what they led Shelley’s parents to believe, they intended to be nothing more than neutral observers on Shelley’s journey, there to docu- ment but not interfere or help. It was a role they took seriously. Unless Shelley’s life was in danger, they resolved to stay back and out of his way, even to the point that they made the decision mid- trip to start staying in separate hotels and eating meals apart to keep physical and emotional distance between them. “It allowed him to have his own personal journey without even relying on us simply as friends,” Pandza says. In the end, the trip lasted about two months. He traveled the entire length of New Zealand, with short layovers in Australia and China on the way to Cambodia, then Thailand, all the way from the

north of India to the south and a last minute stop in Dubai. Then Shelley made the heart wrenching decision to cut the trip short: the physical toll on his body was becoming apparent. He’d lost five pounds in two months, weighing just 95 on a good day. “He was progressively going to harder and harder countries to navigate. I think he still thought he could go on, but the way things were, physically, it wasn’t going to end well,” Duprel said. It almost didn’t. Late one night in Cambodia, Duprel and Pandza were in a rickshaw heading back to their hostel, ahead of Shelley and moving fast. They kept looking back, but in the dark and with the distance between them, they couldn’t see Shelley. He was still there, keeping up, right up until the moment that

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