Travel Bits: September 2020
When will we travel again.......
As international border closures and restrictions continue to remain in force due to the ongoing pandemic, the question on the minds of most travellers must be "when will we travel again"? Some may think that the more appropriate question should be "when will we be allowed to travel again"? Because for them, the question is not the the fear of the virus preventing them from travelling but border closures and restrictions.
For me, it is the latter. As a healthy adult with no underlying medical conditions, I am not really afraid of catching the virus. In addition, my usual practices and habits of conforming to rules and regulations such as frequent hand sanitising, wearing of proper face masks when in public places; both indoors and outdoors and observations of social distancing advices meant that I have a lower chance of getting infected though the off-chance. Instead, it is the border closures and restrictions that meant I have to keep my passport firmly in my drawer for now. No international travel and no overseas work trips and vacations. Until these travel restrictions are lifted or eased sufficiently, my passport will continue to remain in my drawer.
My trip to Malaysia in January 2020 was also the only trip that I had taken so far this year. Since then, I had mostly confined myself at home. I did go out for grocery shopping once a week as well as the occasional trips to the office. But mostly, it had been work-from-home, meeting-from-home via online tools as well as communications with family, friends and colleagues through the phone, text messages and social media channels.
The only time in the last eight months when I was not a "hermit" was when I went for a one-night staycation at a hotel. Even during that stay, I could only use the pool at 11.30pm in the night. Due to social distancing measures imposed by the hotel, the only slot available for me to use the pool was, well from 11.30pm to 12.00am! In addition, simply moving from one location to another within the same hotel complex also required that I digitally signed in when I arrived and similarly to digitally sign out when I leave that location. While I fully understand the rationale for these measures to enforce effective contact tracing, it is simply too much hassle for the staycation experience to be fun and enjoyable. With these as well as many other restrictions in place, I don't think I will be paying for another staycation in the near future. :-)
So to answer the question of "when will we travel again"? My personal answer is my passport will likely stay firmly in its place in the drawer and my funds for work and vacation trips will remain happily in my business and personal bank accounts. From the way things are going, I believe that realistically, work and vacation trips may only happen in 2022. Maybe last quarter of 2021 at the earliest. For now, I will continue my new found hermit-lifestyle of staying at home and working from home. Not all bad though as I now have lots of time to catch up on professional enrichments and to read all those books that I bought years ago and which had until now, stayed forgotten in the depths of my study/work room.
To accompany this blog post, I have a photograph of myself using the hotel's famous infinity pool at the weird hour of 11.30pm during my staycation in the beginning of August this year. The buildings in the background are from Singapore's Central Business District (CBD). Although I was not required to wear a mask while in the pool, I wore that mask for this photograph as a reminder to myself of the sign-of-the-times we are all living in at this moment in time. Because without that mask, this photograph will look like a vacation in "normal" times. And that cannot be further from the truth.
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