May Samali knew she had reached her limit when she saw a
tentacle emerging from her hotel dinner in
Sydney.
اضافة اعلان
“I called downstairs and said, ‘I’m a vegan now, thank
you!’” she said. “It was just so much fish. I’d gotten to the point where even
thinking about it made me gag.”
Samali swore off the seemingly unlimited seafood while in
the middle of a required quarantine in the Hotel Sofitel in Sydney in December
and early January. An executive coach, she was repatriating back to Australia
after her
US work visa expired. In addition to having an excess of fish, Samali
was confined to her room all day, forbidden from stepping outside, for two
weeks.
Air travelers around the world are finding themselves in
similar situations, enduring mandatory government quarantines in hotels as they
travel to countries that are very serious about containing the coronavirus.
Their quarantine is not the cushy experience of shorter-term
quarantines or “resort bubbles” found in some destinations such as Kauai and
the British Virgin Islands, where you are able to roam relatively freely on a
resort’s expansive grounds while waiting for a negative coronavirus test.
This is the more extreme yet typical experience of
quarantine life. These mandatory quarantines involve confinement to your room,
24 hours a day, for up to two weeks (assuming you test negative, that is). And
with some exceptions, you are footing the bill — quarantine in New South Wales,
Australia, for example, costs about $2,300 (3,000 Australian dollars) for a
two-week quarantine for one adult, and up to 5,000 Australian dollars for a
family of four to quarantine for two weeks. In January, Britain announced a
mandatory 10-day quarantine from high-risk areas with a similar cost of about
$2,500 for one adult.
Travelers journeying to countries with mandatory hotel
quarantines, which also include New Zealand, mainland China and Tunisia,
generally must have compelling reasons to do so — visiting ailing family
members, engaging in “essential” business travel or carrying out permanent
relocation.
Travel quarantine might seem manageable, even familiar, for
those who have been living in places with shelter-in-place orders and working
from home. Pete Lee, a San Francisco-based filmmaker, wasn’t concerned about
the quarantine when he flew to Taiwan for work and to visit family.
“I was a little bit cocky when I first heard about the
requirement,” Lee said during his eighth day at the Roaders Hotel in Taipei,
Taiwan. “I was inside my San Francisco apartment for 22 out of 24 hours a day!
But it’s a surprisingly intense experience. Those two hours make a big
difference.”
Destination: Unknown
Much of quarantine life is determined by your hotel. And
depending on where you are traveling, you may get to choose your quarantine
hotel, or you may be assigned upon arrival. Lee was able to choose and book his
quarantine hotel from a list compiled by the Taiwanese government, complete
with information about location, cost, room size and the presence (or lack thereof)
of windows. He also footed the bill.
Similarly, Ouiem Chettaoui, a public-policy specialist who
splits her time between Washington, D.C., and Tunisia, was able to choose a
hotel for her weeklong quarantine when returning to Tunis with her husband in
September; she based her selection, the Medina Belisaire & Thalasso, on
price and proximity to the Mediterranean Sea. “We couldn’t see it, but we could
hear it. ... At least, we told ourselves we could!” she said.
Brett Barna, an investment manager who relocated to Shanghai
with his fiancée in November, could select a district in the city but not the
hotel itself. In an attempt to improve their odds, Barna chose the upscale
Huangpu district where, he hoped, the hotels would be higher quality.
“There were four possible hotels in the district, three of
which were nice enough. And then there was the budget option, the Home Inn,” he
said. Barna and his fiancée, to their dismay, ended up paying for quarantine in
that option, which had peeling wallpaper and bleach stains on the floor thanks
to aggressive cleaning protocols.
In Australia and New Zealand, there’s no choice in the
matter — upon landing, your entire flight is bused to a quarantine hotel with
capacity. In most instances, travelers do not know where they are going until
the bus pulls up at the hotel itself.
Joy Jones, a coach and educator based in San Francisco,
traveled to New Zealand with her husband, a New Zealand citizen, and two young
daughters in January. She learned before their departure that they would have
no say where in the country they would be quarantined.
“That was probably the hardest part,” she said. “I could put
together a bag of activities for my older daughter and plan on doing laundry in
the sink. But not having an answer to where we’d be — after more than 21 hours
of flying, with masks — would we have to get another flight? A three-hour bus
ride?” They didn’t. Jones and her family were taken to Stamford Plaza in
Auckland, just 25 minutes from the airport.
Pim Techamuanvivit and her New Zealander husband, however,
were not so lucky. After arriving in Auckland from San Francisco, they were
promptly directed to board a flight to Christchurch and taken to the Novotel
Christchurch Airport hotel. “At that point, we just really, really wanted to
get to the hotel!” said Techamuanvivit, chef-owner of Nari and Kin Khao
restaurants in San Francisco and executive chef of Nahm in Bangkok.
Relief at arriving — finally — might be the initial
reaction, but it doesn’t take long for reality to set in. The hotel room is all
that you’ll see for a not-insignificant period of time.
As Adrian Wallace, a technology project manager who was
quarantined at the Sydney Hilton in August after visiting his ailing father in
Britain, put it: “That moment when the door slams ... it’s reminiscent of the
opening scene of ‘The Shawshank Redemption’!” Wallace said, referring to the
1994 prison movie with Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman.
Passing the time
The challenge is managing the tedium. Working remotely
helped pass the time for a number of the travelers, including Tait Sye, a
senior director at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, who traveled
to Taipei from Washington, D.C., in November. Sye attempted to maintain East
Coast hours for the majority of his quarantine at the Hanns House Hotel,
working from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Wallace ran a half-marathon around his Sydney hotel room (he
was unable to adjust the in-room air conditioner and got very sweaty). Barna
and his fiancée in Shanghai had date nights on Zoom, since official policy
required them to quarantine in separate rooms. A major highlight of their days
came when a hotel employee, clad in full, hazmat-style personal protective
equipment, knocked on the door and pointed an infrared thermometer at their
heads. They were not allowed outside.
Three meals a day
Meals become very important in quarantine life, to mark the
passing of the time and as regular occurrences to break up the monotony of the
day. Food quality, though, varies widely, as Sye learned in Taipei, where meals
were ordered from nearby restaurants.
He recounted the highs of a Michelin-starred meal from Kam’s
Roast Goose and the thoughtfulness of a Thanksgiving dinner decorated with a
paper turkey to the low of an absolutely terrible pizza (at least it was
accompanied by a beer).
For Techamuanvivit, who documented her quarantine in
Christchurch on Twitter, ordering food and grocery delivery was a lifesaver.
“I’m a chef. I suppose I am, shall we say, a snob!” she said. “As a
restaurateur, I don’t have much love for UberEats. But ordering Indian takeaway
proved to be important.” (Others who had delivery options available similarly
cited them as game changing.)
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