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Published: June 11th 2022
Today we head off on our first venture beyond our shores since the dreaded COVID hit back in early 2020. The main reason is of course to go to Canada to visit our beloved daughter Emma, who we haven’t seen for going on three years. We’ll then be continuing on to Europe, for all up nearly three months away from the cold and gloom of Melbourne in winter.
Organising travel seems to have become a lot more complicated in the intervening period. Every country now seems to have developed its own unique set of rules for managing its visitors in times of the dreaded virus. We discover that the EU tried to introduce some uniformity amongst its 27 member states by developing an entry form that all visitors could use. This seemed like a good idea until we found out that only three of the 27 decided to adopt it, with the other 24 all opting instead to come up with forms of their own. We were told that we needed to get an “Australian International Digital COVID Vaccine Certificate”, which would be recognised in “some countries”. This sounded helpful until we discovered that the same government website that told
Issy looking very relaxed
And why not, it was her birthday “yesterday” and will be again tomorrow. Hopefully that doesn’t mean she’ll then be two years older….us about it was then strangely silent on exactly which countries these were. Hmmmm. And of course we had to become world experts on which countries insist you get a COVID test before they’ll let you in, our first stop, the USA, being one of them. But is that a "RT-PCR test" or a “Laboratorial Rapid Antigen Test”, or something different again? And when do you need to get it - three days before you leave, the calendar day before, or is that 24 hours before? What proof do you need to supply that you’ve tested negative - a piece of paper with your name, date of birth, passport number and the name of your mother‘s first dog, and does that have to be in English, or also Spanish, or Portuguese, or Swahili just for good measure? We wonder whether there’s now a black market in these documents; we’re given four digit pins that we need to enter before we can view them. Do you still need to show proof of vaccination if you’re just transiting through somewhere and will never leave the airport? It seems you do in Portugal, where as luck would have it that’s exactly what we’ll
be doing. We also discover that good old Portugal also seems to be about the only country in Europe that doesn’t like our Aussie vaccination certificates ….. so we’ll need to get tested before we “go“ there as well. Double hmmmm. We learn that the Greek embassy in Canberra has prepared a Greek translation of a notice that tells all homeland Greeks that Aussie digital vaccine certificates are good, and suggests that we carry this around with us when we’re there, just in case no one believes us. It’s all Greek to us - we downloaded the notice, but it could say anything and we wouldn’t know. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until we miss a step and they won’t let us on a plane. I begin to wonder if we should have packed a couple of rollaway beds to make sleeping on airport floors a bit more comfy.
We’ve chosen to leave Oz on the Friday of a long weekend. The airport is total chaos; the queue to go through security is in real danger of spilling out onto the footpath. It must be a slow news day in Melbourne; there are news crews with
cameras and microphones covering the chaos. One crew makes its way along our queue interviewing random passengers as they go. Issy jumps out of the way as a microphone's shoved into my face. ”How do you feel about all of this?” I’m asked. They look a bit disappointed when they don’t get a few choice profanities, although I’m sensing from the general mood that they won’t need to look too much further if that’s what they’re after. Hopefully our tightly fitted top grade surgical masks will prevent anyone from recognising us if we do manage to make it onto the six o’clock news.
We head for Maui in Hawaii via Sydney and Honolulu. Issy’s birthday’s on 11 June, and for an hour shortly after we leave Sydney it is indeed her birthday, so I smother her with kisses; hopefully most of the other passengers are too engrossed in their movies to notice. Then we cross the dateline and it’s not her birthday anymore, but tomorrow it will be again. This all feels a bit weird.
We climb in for the long drive from Maui airport to our apartment at Napili on the opposite (west) side of the island. We were expecting lush tropical jungle but the whole place looks like a dusty tinderbox - dry brown grass clinging to spectacular steep craggy peaks, and with scarcely a tree in sight - one match and the whole place looks like it would go up in flames. We remembered Kauai as one of the wettest places on the planet, and its craggy peaks were indeed all shrouded in lush green jungle. We’re not that far from there, yet the contrast could scarcely be more stark. People who’ve been here before have all told us that it's very quiet. They must do "quiet" a bit differently here; I know I was probably half asleep but I’m pretty sure I counted eight traffic lanes, most of them full, on the road out of town away from the airport. Fortunately this has scaled back to a quietish two lanes by the time we reach our destination.
We arrive to be greeted by an email telling us that they’ve decided to change the rules; if we’d been arriving in the good old US of A a mere two days later, we would no longer have needed to bother going through all the rigmarole of getting a COVID test. Grrrrrr.
Our apartment overlooks the very pretty, calm and sandy beach fringing Napili Bay, and we set up shop on our balcony to take in the sunset. We feel like zombies after twenty odd hours on the go, but it seems that even zombies are capable of appreciating this stunning vista.
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Home and Away
Bob Carlsen
Happy birthday, Issy!!!
I look forward to following your extensive travels!