“I HAD forgotten how much I missed this,” said the passenger seated next to me as our aircraft taxied to the gate at Newark Airport.
“This?”, I asked politely, even though I was anxious as hell to get off the plane given the flight had been delayed by two hours and I only had 30 minutes to run to my gate to catch my connection to Paris. This is one of the joys of travel I don’t miss, yet I found it strangely exciting – the adrenalin rush of catching connecting flights.
“The flying, landing, taxiing,” he said. A consultant who’s worked and lived in Cleveland for the last 10 years, he’s on his way to Delhi to see his mother for the first time in 20 months. “She’s celebrating her 75th birthday and no way am I missing it,” he had told me earlier.
As someone who used to do 250 trips a year, my new friend, like all of us, had been relegated to the virtual world – he didn’t even travel domestically in the US when he could. He doesn’t think he’ll ever go back to being on the road as much anymore. “Our clients have gotten used to virtual now, and it’s also less expensive for them if we don’t travel for every meeting, fewer expenses,” he said. “What doesn’t work though are those hybrid meetings where some people are physical and some are virtual – the virtual people tend to get forgotten.”
So, not a big fan of hybrid – which I can empathise with. Hybrid does create unequal worlds – the ones who are there versus the ones who are not. And I think we have too much inequality in the world already for yet another divide to solidify.
His wife and two daughters are happier too to have their father home more of the time. “But I told them, I simply had to go home this trip – I had to get out after 20 months.”
So right now, I imagine him home in Delhi surrounded with love, good curries, family and friends. He was a kind fellow traveller – showed me on his United Airlines app exactly where my gate was so I wouldn’t miss my flight.
Me, I am sitting in my hotel in Paris, my final day before I catch the flight home to Singapore. The breakfast buffet (yes, it’s still a thing in the US and Europe – I thought buffets were gone forever but I was wrong). The staff is clearing up, one is vacuuming the floor around my feet. It’s okay, I am not here. Soft jazz music is playing in the background.
It feels oh so normal, just like the old days.
But outside, the world has gone Omicron-crazy. I am getting messages from home asking, “Can I return earlier?” Their anxiety reminds me that travel is no longer normal.
On the ground, once you get to a place, it feels normal. Entering Paris from the US was the easiest I had ever experienced in all my years of travelling through the dreaded airport of Charles de Gaulle. Other than a locator form I had to fill in and sign on the flight, and return to the crew, no other formality was needed. The immigration officer asked me how many days I intended to stay in France and then said, “enjoy” as she stamped my passport with a flourish. French flair.
Even the traffic to the city was normal. Heavy traffic, ambulances rushing by, took me almost 90 minutes to reach my hotel. It felt good to feel normal.
Restaurants are packed. Maybe it’s my heightened pandemic sense but I never noticed how many restaurants Paris has – everywhere I look. It’s like our food stalls in Singapore. I had lunch at CoCo, a rather posh place near the Opera. There’s a queue to check our vaccination status – you have to download the Pas Sanitaire, which acts as your EU Digital Covid Certificate, which means I should be able to use it anywhere in Europe.
Outside a theatre, there’s a long queue for tickets. It’s freezing, zero degrees, but people are hungry for theatrical sensations, just as they are for culinary delights and human interactions. Paris reminds me most of New York in the sense that because both cities had it quite bad in the early days, they have returned more cautiously, but both cities are back, swinging.
Marseille, in the south, well that’s another story. I will have to write a book called “Covid – The Culture Wars” one day.
Walking through the Marais today, in the cold winter sun, I reflected on how ironic travel has become.
When you get there (to a place), it’s absolutely fine and normal. New tools now allow you to travel easily as a solo female traveller. Uber for rides, Uber Eats for food (if you wish to dine in), Google Maps to ensure you don’t get lost in the labyrinth of streets in Paris or Marseille, review sites, blogs, social media – places open up to you like wildflowers in bloom.
It’s the getting there that’s the issue. Omicron has sent the world into a dizzying panic. I love how WHO says it is “of concern” and then tells governments not to panic. WHO really needs a communications director.
Each day, I read of borders closing to travellers from Africa – how sad that we are still doing what we did two years ago, when we closed our borders to China. You’d think we’d have learnt something from that. Isolation breeds worse diseases than Covid.
New measures being introduced across the world; Australia rolling back its reopening; South Korea halting its easing of measures; Singapore too.
Meanwhile, I think of destinations in Asia like Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia which have worked so hard to get their populations vaccinated so that their citizens can get back to normal lives and business with some form of tourism. But now I’ve been told cancellations are flying in, thick and fast. “When will we see the end of this tunnel?”, lamented a tour operator friend.
Me, I got my negative ART test result in hand and am ready to fly home to Singapore and reading the news this morning, it seems I will arrive in the nick of time before new measures are introduced to keep the variant at bay from Singapore for as long as possible. I wonder what advice King Canute would have for us.
Such a sense of déjà vu. In March 2020, I caught a flight from Penang to Singapore and arrived an hour before borders closed.
Seems nothing has changed, yet everything has.