Daire Collins | Deputy Features Editor
It’s two weeks since the adventure ended and everyone has moved on. What remains of Jailbreak 2014 to most is the knowledge that two Trinity lads made it to Sydney and the memory of the social media storm that happened on the weekend of 22 February. I, myself was on the inside, a Jailbreaker, who along with George Voronov made Team 27. In short, we blagged, begged and hopped our way across Europe with a mixture of preparation and luck. We met some incredible people and had experiences way beyond our expectations. It is still hard to believe, that this incredible operation worked, that almost 90 teams made it out of Ireland and across the globe all for free, raising over €36,000 along the way.
Travelling with no money for 36 hours is fairly stress inducing and was a bit of a reality check on my grand aspirations to one day traverse the globe via hitchhiking and couchsurfing
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From within, the experience was entirely different to what I saw from the outside last year. I have vivid recollections of yesteryear, lying on my couch, tea in one hand, laptop on my lap. This year was anything but relaxing. Travelling with no money for 36 hours is fairly stress inducing and was a bit of a reality check on my grand aspirations to one day traverse the globe via hitchhiking and couchsurfing. Some of this stress was self imposed, as stated, we had made some plans prior to starting. We were lucky enough to have secured flights from Belfast international airport to Italy, courtesy of Topflight Schools. However the timing was tight and didn’t leave any room for error. From 9am till we boarded the flight at 3pm, uncertainty plagued our thoughts. Nothing would have been more embarrassing for us than missing that flight. Our flight afforded us the luxury of relaxing. That lasted until, in true Jailbreak fashion, I made an inflight announcement pleading for onward transportation. A new fear set in after landing, that of the unknown, as we hopped onto a tour group’s bus heading into the Italian night. We had no idea where we were going, it would take three hours and arrive in Brunico, a small Northern Italian town at 11pm.
From the moment we had secured the flights to Italy, the Monday prior to leaving, we started looking at maps and thinking about where we could go. A Jailbreak team is constrained by the acts of other people and although I had the ultimate goal of Africa in my head, the list of banned countries and our flight landing in Verona, 2,000km from the African coast, put that idea to rest. We had always believed that we would be beaten in distance by someone who would leave Dublin at 9 and arrive in Sydney on Sunday morning, so a long time ago we decided we wanted to be different. In that sense we had set our sights on the mountains prior to leaving, but had no idea how’d we end up getting there. In hindsight, we were outrageously optimistic, packing only a spare tshirt, devoting the rest of the space to a pair of ski trousers, goggles and gloves. Our optimism twice took a battering. First experience of such a low was 11:30pm in Brunico, Italy. We had made it all the way to a ski resort without paying a cent, yet being forced to pay €50 each for a night’s accommodation turned out to be the expensive straw that broke the donkey’s back. By the time we had sat down to have our first beer of the trip, we were adamant that our plan to get free boards and lift passes would fail in this strangely Germanic part of Italy. The second low came the following morning, when a ski rep, who after much negotiating and pestering had promised us a free lift pass, disappeared.
Myself and George fully believe without the help of the students we would have never gotten the lift pass, and had to leave Brunico never having reached our goal.
In both cases, we were rescued from our pit of despair by strangers. In the bar on the Saturday night, the kind people of the New Horizon’s Ski Club, convinced us not to give up, to give it one more go. The same goes for the Austrian students we met the next day (also in a bar, this time on the base of the slopes). The students went as far to help improve our woeful German explanation of Jailbreak. Myself and George fully believe without the help of the students we would have never gotten the lift pass, and had to leave Brunico never having reached our goal. Yet, these two groups of strangers took the time to listen to our cause, to buy us drinks and to help us on our way. We made it to 2,273m, the highest of any Jailbreak team. It may have been a prize category we made up, but we didn’t care we got to snowboard our way back down.
It was the ultimate 21st century adventure, something which would have been radically different if not impossible a mere 10 years ago. There was a bizarre feeling of connectivity with the other teams, despite being for the most part strangers who were moving in different directions, thousands of miles apart. That is not to mention, the incredible feeling of support which followed us everywhere as we checked into Facebook and with our Jailbreak HQ Tracker, Foldha. Even more incredible was the way in which people’s interest and support turned into monetary contribution, an incredible €36,000 raised for two very deserving charities. For every nay sayer out there, there are two donating money. For everyone who complains that the travel costs could have better spent on charity, it is hard to imagine €36,000 being raised if we all stayed in Dublin for weekend. And finally to anyone dubious that we just went on a ski holiday, we got the ski pass at 2:00pm and were off the slopes for good by 4:00pm. We left the following morning to make our way back home.
