Marco the Bear is travelling 193,121km around the world in four months to raise money for disabled Hong Kong school children. Here, with the help of Cathay Pacific Sunnyside Club vice-chairman Rob Watson who 'discovered' him, Marco describes how his unlikely mission came about
Being a Teddy Bear can be a terrible bore. You sit in a toy shop, you're sold to some spoilt child, pampered for a while, then stuffed into a cupboard or left on the end of a bed and forgotten. Five or six years later, you get your only breath of fresh air when you're chucked out with the rest of your adolescent owner's unwanted toys.
Unless your name's Pooh or Yogi, you're never going to achieve cele-bear-ity status. And unless you're lucky enough to be Paddington (my personal idol), you're never going to travel the world. That's why the advice given by the older, wiser toys in the shop when a potential buyer comes along is: 'Grin and bear it'.
So I wasn't expecting much when a middle-aged guy strolled into the shop in Central, picked me up and announced: 'He's perfect.' When you're 66cm tall, blonde, perfectly formed and irresistibly furry, that's exactly the kind of compliment you're bred to expect.
When he haggled my price down by 25 per cent to HK$600, I was frankly insulted, and braced myself to be taken off to the clutches of an overindulged brat whose idea of fun would be throwing me out of his window with his younger sister's Barbie doll to see who hit the ground first.
Imagine my surprise then, when instead of taking me home, he whisked me off to a succession of tailors asking them if they cut a Cathay Pacific junior first officer's uniform in teddy bear size. Not surprisingly, most of them said 'We don't do bears', until one sympathetic tailor in Tsim Sha Tsui agreed to the task.
By eavesdropping on the conversations, I gradually figured out what destiny had in store for me. I wasn't going to be a child's plaything and I wasn't being dressed up in a pilot's uniform for any sinister motive. I was going to be known as Marco and I was going to travel the world like my hero Paddington - only in more style.
