Quarantine Diary 0.1
(London to Singapore)
6-7 September 2020
Thought I’d share the story of my first journey during “The Pandemic”.
Partly for your amusement, partly as a resource travellers… but mostly to keep myself occupied for the next two weeks.
The trip is started with the seemingly simple journey LHR-SIN-ADL - from my current home in the UK to Singapore, then onto my Australian hometown of Adelaide.
But it’ll then involve a two-week hotel quarantine lock-in in Adelaide - more on that later.
First, the “new world” of aviation.
It began with London Heathrow Airport (Terminal 2), which was perhaps slightly busier than I expected… yet quiet by usual standards.
Check-in and security were surprisingly typical (albeit with shorter queues).
Everyone wore masks (bar a few idiots) and the “social distancing signage” was omnipresent.
But really, it felt pretty typical.
I was an anticipating an environment more akin to a “nuclear incident” - but the emptier Heathrow was rather peaceful and pleasant.
Everyone also just felt a bit more caring.
Passengers boarded the Singapore Airlines flight. People merely transiting through Singapore (such as myself) were asked to board first.
Again it was all surprisingly typical - one notable difference being the little coronavirus “care pack” given to passengers (containing a spare mask, hand sanitiser and a single, tiny bacterial wipe). It felt a token effort, truth be told.
While I was not apprehensive, I’d have liked to have seen more overt wiping down and cleanliness of surfaces - if only for appearances!
(No need to email me about the bigger danger being air-borne particles circulating in a pressurised sky tube!)
Of course the airline staff wore masks and safety glasses through the flight. They were all very professional.
Passengers seated near me seemed diligent mask wearers (except for meals and drinks) and stayed in their seats as much as possible.
Social distancing was all but impossible, which is to be expected on a plane.
I never saw passengers admonished by airline stuff for breaching the rules.
Wearing a mask did make it more difficult to sleep throughout the 13-hour flight. I mainly worked on my computer (editing the next Unmade Podcast episode) and watched a couple of TV shows.
At Changi Airport (SIN) people terminating at Singapore were de-planed first, then the transit passengers.
It was immediately obvious that Singapore was taking things more seriously, with lots of masked-up, PPE-wearing stuff herding transit passenger to an area immediately adjacent to the arrival gate.
Here a large waiting area was set aside for people transiting - the usual shops and restaurants were closed and inaccessible.
Essentially we were all seated in a small section of one hallway, plus a cordoned-off departure lounge for VIP passengers (the two were not much different).
This was home for another 17 hours.
There didn’t seem to be many people (a couple of hundred at most) and there was lots of space to sit, work and sleep.
I had feared it would be worse.
Some food and drinks were available, or you could order meals from nearby restaurants via an app.
You could also do some duty free shopping via an app if you were so-inclined!?
Then it was time for the Adelaide flight - and things got weird (enhanced by sleep deprivation perhaps).
It turned out other parts of the airport were receiving and dispatching more people, unseen by me until then.
We were all herded onto airport trains and along concourses in strange ant trails, grouped by flights and ordered around by full PPE-wearing airline staff.
It felt very “end of days”, but everyone I saw (an occasionally spoke to) was calm and good-natured about the situation.
There was a feeling of “we’re all in this together”.
But it truly was surreal - all these plane-loads of people being shuffled around the otherwise empty and cavernous halls of Changi.
It reminded me of that sight you sometimes see: A few adults worriedly ushering a single-file column of school children around a busy city.
But I was the school kid.
After more security checks (forget social distancing for that!), we finally boarded a very empty plane headed for Adelaide.
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