by Anthony Ham (Post Pandemic Travel Feature)
In March 2020, I flew home to Australia from the US. It was a time of great uncertainty, and it now seems like a very long time ago: I was in the US when the country had its first confirmed case of coronavirus, Donald Trump was still president, and Joe Biden was floundering badly in the early Democratic primaries for the presidential nomination. At the time, Mike Bloomberg looked as if he were the man most likely; I was in Montgomery, Alabama, when Biden turned it all around on Super Tuesday.
On my way home, half of the airport at LAX was closed, and on my flight was a family whose version of personal protective gear involved wearing multiple garbage bags secured by rubber bands. It was impossible to buy masks in the US before my departure, and no-one on our flight of nearly 400 people was wearing a mask.
I have encountered many dangerous situations in a lifetime of travel. But perhaps the most dangerous of them all was to fly halfway across the globe in the midst of a global pandemic. A few days after my return, Australia’s borders slammed shut behind me.
Escape from Lockdown
In the early days back home, it felt safe to be locked up at home. After my two weeks of isolation at home, on brief forays out, people were nicer. There was a sense of some frightening but shared experience. People crowded around radios to hear the latest news and pandemic announcements, and it felt like the stories I’ve heard of wartime: it was a time of great peril and solidarity.
Over the nearly two years that have followed, all of this became the new normal – the reduced horizons, and the regular, worsening news reports filled with dire projections of a world struggling to cope. The sense of solidarity faded as the harsh reality hit home, that this would not be over in months, that the death toll would run into the millions, and that it could be a very long time before we could travel again to places and people we longed to see.
In two years, my only journey outside my home state of Victoria, was a ten-day trip into the Great Sandy Desert, northwest of Alice Springs. There, in the company of elderly Warlpiri Aboriginal women, I learned the healing power of silence and ancient lands. I paid for my brief dose of freedom: the day after my return home, we went into the strictest form of isolation, and within two days, I went from a seemingly eternal horizon to not even being allowed to go out my front door. Even so, the memories of whispering desert oaks and sand dunes and storytelling around campfires sustained me over the long months that followed.
I well knew that an inability to travel ranked low on the list of grave pandemic consequences. But I also came to see travel and its complications as emblematic of what the pandemic had done to the world. Gone was the early solidarity: our inability to visit far-off places contributed to an increasingly inward gaze, and when it came time to distribute vaccines, we looked after ourselves first. And for all the doomsaying that the world, that travel, would never be the same again, that we would return from our time-out to reassess our relationship with nature, the early signs were that the two years of the pandemic were less a paradigm shift than a hiatus that changed everything and nothing.
Seychelles to the Rescue
Almost two years after I returned from the US, the BBC asked me to go to Seychelles and I finally had the chance to travel internationally again. Somewhat suitably, my departure was delayed when I caught Covid. After so long trying to avoid the disease, I felt a perverse sense of relief to finally be one of the daily case numbers. It would add a whole new level of anxiety to those last days before departure – applications for authorisation to enter Seychelles, permissions to return to Australia and Victoria, for example. Worst of all was the Covid-19 PCR test that I had to do no more than 72 hours prior to my departure for Seychelles. Although I was fully recovered, there was still a real risk that I could test positive, throwing my plans into chaos. It was a strange way to prepare for a trip.
Fewer than 36 hours before I was due to leave, the test result came back negative. Only then did I believe that I was actually going.
After such a prolonged build-up, the trip itself was almost anti-climactic. There were perhaps fewer people in the airports through which I passed. And entering the Seychelles, there was from the local authorities a suspicion about my reasons for travel, something which I had never before encountered there. But, otherwise, it was – depressingly, reassuringly – familiar.
Because my trip was for less than a week, no sooner had I landed than I had to start planning my return. There were Covid tests that had to be reserved to coincide with a tight window before my departure. I had to arrange the necessary permissions so that Seychelles would let me leave and Australia would let me back in. I spent the best part of an afternoon filling out, and double-checking, the necessary paperwork. And, of course, there were the not-inconsiderable worries: What would happen if I tested positive on the day of my departure? Where would I stay? How long would it be before I could return home? What if my paperwork wasn’t in order? Unlike coming in the other direction, all of the documents were on my phone. What if I lost my phone or there was no wifi at the airport?
Everything ran smoothly. Of course it did: we’ve all become better at following government directives and negotiating bureaucracy over the past two years. But I arrived home more exhausted than refreshed.
Healing Power of Travel
Apart from the added layers of anxiety and stress, it was, it’s true, wonderful to see a world beyond my own, to see that there was still a world out there where people were going about their business much as they had before. It was good to have conversations that weren’t about Covid. And there were moments when the healing power of travel took hold, when for a short time I could forget the difficulties and fears of the past two years. There were moments, in fact – sitting around a table discussing local culinary traditions, hiking through a cloud forest looking for birds, swimming in a torrential tropical downpour – when it was easy to forget that there had been a pandemic at all.
At such times, it was as if I had never been away.
For similar articles check out the rest of our series on Travel in a Post Pandemic World by Anthony Ham and Sue Watt.