Let’s talk about how it felt to travel abroad post-pandemic!
My trip to Iceland in April was the first time I’ve been abroad since the plague got started. My first time on a plane. My first time in a city bigger and busier than Salisbury. I was nervous. I had a plane to face, I had tour buses, I had an airport – two airports. I know plenty of people have been travelling since the summer of 2020 because their right to their summer beach holiday is more important than everyone else’s right to not die of a killer plague virus but I’ve not done it, personally.
That’s partly because there’s a killer plague virus on the loose but partly because I cannot tolerate a throat swab. Nose, ok. I’m fine with that. But just thinking about a throat swab triggers my gag reflex so if I had to be tested and couldn’t 1000% guarantee it was only a nose swab, I couldn’t go wherever that was. Iceland was testing everyone on arrival for a long time and then they did random testing for a while. Can’t guarantee I’m not going to get picked up for that random test, ergo can’t go. But in February Iceland dropped all testing, all precautions and all restrictions and once I realised that, I decided the plague had probably receded enough that I could get on a plane as long as I didn’t have to be tested. So off I went.
I was still nervous. I’ve never been very sociable but I’m now verging on hermit. The idea of going to a crowded airport and then getting on a plane and sitting next to a stranger, with no one wearing masks -it’s going to take me a while to get used to all that again. And I said “post-pandemic” in the title but this isn’t post pandemic. I’ve not seen the WHO downgrade it; it’s still ongoing but we do seem to be beating it down at the moment.
I wore my mask. I have a pile of beautiful and eccentric reusable fabric ones and those are fine for trips to Tesco and Hobbycraft and Brownies but if I’m going anywhere crowded, like to a comedy show or on a plane, I’m breaking out the FFP2. I have great faith in these things. I sat in front of a woman in a busy theatre in January who announced “Hubby’s home with covid so I’ve had to come on my own” and who I’m blaming for me getting pinged 48 hours later. But I didn’t catch it because I was wearing my medical mask. So although it wasn’t as comfortable as I would have liked, I tolerated my medical mask from the moment I arrived at Heathrow until I got outside at Keflavik. I think I put a fabric mask on for the bus trip into town because it was a 63-seater with 17 passengers and I sat at the back. Fabric can cope. I even took it off to shovel salt & vinegar Quavers in my face – well, it had been a long time since I’d eaten and it would be at least another hour and a half to wait.
Even though I knew all restrictions had been removed, I was kind of surprised that no one wore masks in Iceland. It’s a tiny population; they’ve never had the same levels of out-of-controlness with the virus that we have on Plague Island and they’ve probably taken the decision to remove masks because they’re genuinely not necessary, whereas Plague Island removed them because the population was tired of having its human rights violated at the request of a Prime Minister who’s broken his own rules at every turn and we’re no longer in a position where we can try to restrict the spread. By now, mid-May, I’m ok with going to pubs and bars unmasked with friends occasionally. I’ll pop into a small quiet shop unmasked if the other choice is digging in my bag for the mask. Yes, laziness. Masks still on for public transport, medical masks still for theatres and I’ll still choose to be outside whenever it’s physically possible.
So what did I do in Iceland? I kept my mask on for public transport just because it feels wrong not to. I have two justifications for that. Number one, Iceland may have low rates. Icelanders are not really a risk to me. On the other hand, I’ve just arrived from Plague Island. I’m a risk to them. Number two, tourists are not necessarily coming from countries with low rates. Where there are abundant non-Icelanders, the mask is going on. My masks are fun – they have dinosaurs and monsters and rainbows and world maps on. They say “I want to wear a mask but look, I’m having fun with it, I’m not wearing preachy masks, I’m wearing cool masks!”.
But shops were another matter. Shops were almost universally pretty quiet. My local supermarket is a convenience store, which rarely had more than two other customers and two staff in it. I didn’t wear my mask. It felt conspicuous and it felt unnecessary. I was social distancing from the sheer fact that it was so quiet and empty. Tourist shops were much the same – tourism is clearly recovering here but the puffin shops aren’t yet overwhelmed with visitors buying Viking hats and coffee table books and cuddly puffins.
By the end of my nine days, I’d stopped wearing my mask on public buses. Well, on my very last bus, to be specific. After nine days off Plague Island, I’m hopefully no more risk than any native Icelander. But it felt wrong and it felt dirty and it felt transgressive. In a way, it felt good. I mean, it felt nice to not have a piece of lightweight fabric strapped to my face but it also felt good in that “you’re being naughty!” way.
Really, it was all about the masks. I enjoyed being able to travel again. I enjoyed that I could do to places and do things and there were no restrictions and no testing and no real sensation of danger. It felt like life, and holidays, were getting back to normal. Two years of chaos and craziness has passed and the light at the end of the tunnel is right here, all around me. I wasn’t afraid and I didn’t feel guilty. I felt tired – I put together quite the itinerary for my first four days! – and I felt permanently cold and wet because the weather was mostly pretty terrible and I realised that my enthusiasm for getting back to Iceland at last should have been tempered with “wait until summer when it won’t rain every day”. The only thing was making my own decisions on when I was and wasn’t going to wear a mask and what type.
Tell you what, those masks came in handy. I’ve been editing the video this weekend – more on that when I’ve finished – and there’s a shot of me inaudibly chatting to the camera outside with a dinosaur mask on. The reason for that is that the wind was howling and it was freezing and the rain was coming in sideways and it was actually quite good for keeping my face warm and dry. I took two masks every day – those fabric masks get damp after a while if you’re breathing warm air inside them and although I’d be taking them off every time I left the bus, I wanted a dry one for the second half of the day, or at least I wanted the option of a dry one. I got through ten fabric masks. I was only away for nine days and I wore the FFP2s on both travelling days, so that was an impressive lot. To be fair, one of them ended up in the washbag because it got drenched on Saturday without me even wearing it. The one I wore managed to stay dry but my spare in my bag got soaked during the hot river hike.
So, treating the Iceland trip like a test, I’m ok with going abroad more. I’m thinking of taking the train to Rotterdam for a long weekend and of spending my birthday in Switzerland by train – eleven hours from my favourite station, which isn’t so bad. By the time you’ve sat in an airport and waited to taxi and to disembark and to get through passport control, that’s not a lot slower. I’ve wanted to do an epic train trip for a while anyway. Sitting next to someone who Used The Bag on the way back from Iceland put me off planes again a bit (I tried to cover my eyes and ears with my hands at the same time and discovered I just don’t have enough hands; and I leaned so far away that if I could have shoved myself through the side of the plane and into the fresh air 39,000ft above the North Atlantic, I would have). Yeah. Masks, no testing and travel.
On the other hand, isn’t long-distance travel a hassle? I’ve got so used to not packing a bag and carting it for four hours to and through an airport that there’s going to be a lot more UK travel and camping and outdoor adventures in my future than there ever used to be. Starting tomorrow.