This blog has been badly neglected for a couple of years now, but since I did managed to make a single post last year, I didn't want to let this year go by without posting at least one entry. Of course there are a wealth of topics I could go on and on about, whether it's the US finally voting out the worst president in its history (and him promptly making an even further disgrace of himself by refusing to accept the results), numerous events around the world, developments in space exploration, the more than three dozen books I've read since I last wrote on that topic, and more, I decided to make it easy on myself and post something that I'd already written more than half of: an account of a trip we took to New Zealand in March and how the growing coronavirus pandemic affected it. While we, like the vast majority of people around the world, won't be able to make any foreign trips for at least a few more months yet (at least here in Taiwan domestic travel is no problem), our last one was memorable enough to last us for some time yet.
A Trip to New Zealand as the Fight Against the Coronavirus Was Ramping Up
In March, we went on a previously planned vacation to New Zealand. Though the coronavirus situation globally worldwide was worsening, it didn’t even occur to us to cancel our trip. My wife had bought the tickets (non-refundable, of course) the previous December as a family treat, and for us it was a big expense, the type we can only afford every couple of years. Once the epidemic hit, our main worry was that travel restrictions would prevent us from going. We weren’t particularly worried about the virus itself. Taiwan had only about 50 cases (out of a population of 23 million), despite well over a month and a half having passed since the first case was reported in late January, and there were only a handful of confirmed cases in New Zealand at the time we departed (I think it was eight on the day we departed). Without any community spread to speak of in either country and a direct flight between them, the chances of encountering anyone with the virus seemed extremely low, though we would have to take a little extra care in the airports, since that was the one place we were likely to encounter travelers from places where the virus was more widespread.
As it happened, the airports weren’t a big issue either, since a lot of flights had already been cancelled, and with a lot fewer people around, social distancing wasn’t too difficult, except on the flight itself (which of course mainly held people from Taiwan, who were very unlikely to have the virus). But we had to leave a day later than planned, because our original flight had been cancelled, though the airline put us on the next day’s flight without charge. Then on the way to the airport, we read that New Zealand had just announced that incoming travelers from all but a handful of countries would be required to self-isolate for 14 days on arrival. However, the policy would only go into force at midnight on the night after our arrival, meaning it didn’t apply to us. When we got to Auckland, everything seemed to be business as usual. Everything was open, people were out and about, and we only saw a single person (possibly a tourist) wearing a mask. It looked like our vacation could proceed as planned.
We set off to some of the major tourist spots, and for most of the trip, things were fairly normal. The coronavirus did come up a lot in conversation. On a day tour from Rotorua to the Waitomo Caves and the Hobbiton movie set, our driver and a young British couple and I started discussing the situation. The British couple had been in the country for some time, but they now weren’t sure when they’d be leaving, as the next stage on their journey through that part of the world was Indonesia, which their government was advising against visiting. The driver said their company had no bookings for the coming weeks, and she feared she was going to be laid off. Another driver who we hired to take us from Turangi (where the long-distance bus stopped) into the Tongariro National Park a day or two later also said there were a lot of cancellations, though the national park itself seemed to have a fair number of visitors. While we were in the national park, we saw on the local news that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had announced that non-residents would be banned from entering the country beginning from midnight that night, though people on planes that were already in the air would be allowed in even if they landed after midnight. We also learned that Taiwan was now requiring most incoming travelers to self-quarantine for 14 days after arrival, a restriction that would apply to us. In both countries, there’d been a fairly sharp uptick in cases, though they nearly all involved incoming travelers, not community spread.
The next day we arrived in Wellington. Life still seemed to be going on mostly as normal, though two women sitting behind me on the bus were discussing the coronavirus situation. We stayed in a hotel that dated back to the 19th century (Queen Elizabeth apparently stayed there in the 1960s). The woman at the hotel reception counter was initially hesitant about letting us check in, since she thought we were supposed to be self isolating (they had a sign saying that anyone arriving after the 15th was supposed to self-isolate; on seeing our March 15 entry stamps, she apparently forgot about the “after”), but she relented, though she asked us to avoid the common room. The next day we found that all the museums were closed indefinitely, though when we walked to the waterfront and hiked up to the Mt. Victoria lookout there were plenty of people in both places. On our second full day, we started to see a few more people with masks (though still a small minority), and when we ate in at a restaurant in the evening we had to write down our contact information. I also noticed a few people making an extra effort not to touch things, for example using their elbow to press the pedestrian crossing button at intersections (something I started doing myself). It was clear things were getting a bit more tense.
The next day (March 23) we flew from Wellington back to Auckland. We had only booked the tickets right after arriving in Wellington, and the plane wasn’t full. As it turned out, this was our second lucky break as far as timing went, after just gotten in ahead of the self-isolation requirement. On arrival at the Auckland airport’s domestic terminal, we got a round trip ticket on the airport bus, figuring that we’d be coming back in just a few days (as it turned out, we should have just gotten a one-way ticket into the city). As the bus passed the international terminal, we saw that it was packed with people; apparently foreign travelers were already trying to get out while they could (we later heard that the airport ended up limiting entry to people who had tickets for flights leaving in the next five hours).
The streets of Auckland were already noticeably different from the way they had been just a week earlier. Quite a few people were wearing masks, though still a minority, and some places were closed. My wife had booked a short-stay apartment, which was quite nice while still being only a little more expensive than the backpacker hostel we’d stayed at previously. Most importantly, it had a fully equipped kitchen, which turned out quite handy. But for lunch we went to a nearby Nando’s (a South Africa-based chain restaurant). This turned out to be our last meal in a restaurant for the trip. My main goal for the last two days was to shop for local music (I’d already bought some in Wellington) and check out the secondhand bookstores. The record store we visited first was open (and had a lot of good stuff), though the bookstore up the road a ways from it turned out to be closed.
It was probably only upon returning to our apartment that we heard the news. Covid-19 cases had continued to creep up over the past few days, and they had just passed 100. In addition, two of the cases were suspected to involve community spread. This prompted the prime minister to announce that the country was immediately entering level 3 on their newly instituted alert system, and would be entering level 4 — a complete lockdown — at 11:59 on March 25. Realizing that we could expect even more restaurants to be closing down, we decided to go buy several meals worth of food at a supermarket. We had seen stories about panic buying at supermarkets, so we weren’t too surprised to see that they were only letting people into the store in batches, and that there were signs stating that for most items you could only buy two. But while there were certainly some bare shelves, there was also a fair amount of food available, and we were able to get some frozen pasta, bread, fruit, and other items. But rather than immediately eating our new supplies, for dinner I went out for takeout pizza, though notably some restaurants were already completely shut down.
The next day, we went back to the record store we’d visited and had take out from a nearby Subway, chatting briefly with the ethnic Indian couple who ran it about the virus situation. In the afternoon, we decided to have a last bit of touristy adventure. We went down to the port and caught a ferry across to Devonport, a pleasant little suburb of Auckland. There was a used bookstore there that was still open, and we browsed there for awhile (I bought a few books, including a couple I’d been searching for) and took a walk along the waterside before catching a ferry back to central Auckland. We had noticed that while most of the fast food places and some other restaurants were still open, everything was now takeout only. The streets were also even less crowded then they had been a day earlier, though they weren’t quite deserted. We were able to do a little bit of shopping at the stores that were still open; I bought a few new CDs at an electronics store.
We spent March 25, our last full day in Auckland, walking about the central city. There were still people on the streets, but almost all the stores and restaurants were closed, including all the fast food places. I did stop in one of the few restaurants that was still open for take out for a milkshake, but we ate our meals at our apartment, using up the food we’d gotten at the supermarket previously. We spent some time in a park not far away from the apartment and we checked out the local buildings; I was impressed to note that there were quite a few old buildings in everyday use, such as one with 1909 carved on the lintel that had a pharmacy on the first (or as they would say ground) floor. But while it was a pleasant day and there were still people around, the whole atmosphere was strange and slightly tense due to all the closed shops and knowledge of the impending lockdown.
Through these last few days, we had of course been keeping an eye on our flight, but fortunately it was one of the few that hadn’t been canceled. And to say that it was fortunate is an understatement, as after March 31, there would be no flights to Taiwan (or many other places) at all. But there was still the matter of getting to the airport in order to catch the flight. As I mentioned earlier, we’d bought round-trip tickets on the airport bus when we’d arrived on the flight from Wellington, but when we first heard that the lockdown would be starting at midnight the night before (our flight was on the morning of March 26), I became worried about whether the buses would be running. On the 24th, we’d stopped by the airport bus ticket office in central Auckland to check, and it turned out I’d been right to worry; the airport bus wouldn’t be operating during the lockdown. So how where we to get to the airport? The fact that our flight was leaving as scheduled wouldn’t do us any good if we couldn’t catch it.
Luckily, we found out that there was also a shuttle service to the airport, and that was still going to be running. So early on the 26th, we waited for the shuttle bus (a van, actually) outside the apartment building. It came on time, and we rode with a few other travelers out to the airport through quiet streets. Admittedly, since it was only just getting light (I forget the exact time, but it was probably before 7), it was kind of hard to tell how different things were under lockdown. The difference was more obvious once we got to the airport itself.
At the airport, things were still pretty subdued, except at the few operating check-in counters. These were a small hive of activity in an otherwise empty departure hall. A guy from one young family was desperately arguing with the airline staff, but I didn’t hear enough to be able to tell what their situation was. The rest of us got checked in smoothly enough, and after getting through the passport and security checks we had an hour or more before boarding time in what was an almost empty airport. Every shop and restaurant was closed, and the departure board was filled with canceled flights. There was a flight to Tokyo leaving some time before ours, but that was the only other flight anywhere near our departure time that was still going. So the only people we saw hanging around in the empty airport besides those who would be on our flight were some from that one. One consolation was that at least until we got to the gate, social distancing wasn’t a problem.
After hanging around in a mostly empty airport for an hour, the boarding gate was a study in contrasts, even if many of the people we saw in both places were the same. At the gate, everyone was crowded together, but not only was practically everyone wearing masks, some were wearing two, and a few people were wearing things that looked almost like hazmat suits. Frankly, I thought this was overdoing it a bit, as even at this point New Zealand had only around 200 cases, and the odds that any of us actually had the virus were pretty small. Still, I probably shouldn’t fault people for erring on the side of caution – though many of them undercut their own efforts to a degree when the plane finally landed at Taoyuan International Airport in Taiwan, as they crammed together in the aisle waiting to get off, without any effort at social distancing.
Now we were safely back in Taiwan, but our adventure wasn’t entirely over yet. Like all other arrivals in Taiwan, including everyone else on our flight (well, except for three people who were stuck at the airport for a day, since they had intended to transfer on to other destinations, something Taiwan was no longer allowing; eventually they were allowed to do it anyway, though the airline was fined for letting them on in the first place), we now had to go into quarantine for 14 days. Fortunately, we could to this at home. We got into our designated taxi after being sprayed with disinfectant and were taken straight to our building. Once back in our apartment, we had to remain there for the next two weeks, and family and friends who brought us food had to leave it outside our door for us to take in after they’d left.
The quarantine caused a few complications – I had to record a couple of my radio shows on my computer and I had to reschedule a class I’d been supposed to teach on the very last day of the quarantine – but for the most part it wasn’t too bad. Of course back in New Zealand, people had to endure a much longer period of being stuck at home, though they were not completely banned from going outside, as long as they stayed away from others. The long lockdown proved worthwhile, of course, as New Zealand eventually managed to bring the virus under control and eliminate local transmission. As for Taiwan, despite a relative surge in cases during the time we’d been in New Zealand and then in quarantine, with measures like the quarantine we and other arrivals from abroad went through, it remained relatively free of the virus without having to enter any kind of lockdown. Even at the time I’m finishing this off at the end of the year, Taiwan has only had about 800 cases total, with seven deaths, even fewer than New Zealand, despite a much larger population. The only certain case of local transmission in Taiwan since April occurred in late December. So as it happens, what was true at the time we went to New Zealand is even more true now: Taiwan and New Zealand are probably the best places in the world to be as far as the pandemic is concerned.
Nevertheless, as great as New Zealand was and still is, we were very fortunate in that we happened to get out just as the lockdown started. Who knows what we would have done if we’d actually been stuck there with no way of getting back home? But all’s well that ends well, and we look forward to visiting New Zealand again someday – but we hope next time it won’t be in the midst of a global pandemic.
