Abandon Ship!

We’ve been ‘stuck’ in India now for almost eight months – four months longer than we intended.  According to the “original plan” we should already have enjoyed May and June in Sri Lanka, passed through Indonesia (Sabang on the northern tip of Sumatra) and have already have had a month or so in either Malaysia or Thailand.  We joke that we’ve been here so long, we are expecting to receive our Indian passports soon!

We are safe and we feel very well looked after here in India.  We did some amazing travelling before lock down, have met some wonderfully friendly people, and from lock down onwards, have enjoyed a great environment in and around the marina.  You can read about our Indian adventures here  https://ripeningnicely.com/category/travel/india/

Our original Covid plan was to lay low in the marina in Kochi until it all blew over, before continuing east.  The fact is that it turned into a bit of a never ending waiting game – we need not only India to let us out, but also other countries to be open to let us in.  Of course countries have become more concerned with the cruisers already in their country let alone ones, like us, looking to enter.  Updates have been unclear and at the best of times, a real moving target.  Cruisers have become a low priority with commercial shipping (understandably more important than us, but with onerous requirements) and more lucrative package tourists being ahead of us in being allowed back into SE Asia. We are now hearing that Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia may not be letting in cruising yachts until 2021.

I think that a big part of my original reluctance to abandon Aroha and our ‘lay low in Kochi’ approach has been that it made me feel like we’ve failed in this new life we’ve chosen.  All the worse is that we’d only been able to call ourselves cruisers for a meagre three months until lockdown rendered that title worthless.  No one likes to admit failure, and one side of me felt that we should stick with Aroha and as close to the “original plan” as possible.

There have been opportunities for us to leave India and Aroha, but the big unknown has been having some sort of certainty of when we would be able to return to India to collect Aroha and continue our journey.  This fear has pushed us to stick to our “lay low” plan until now.  It wasn’t really until after a Kiwi couple from the marina decided to fly home to NZ in June on a charter flight that we started really wondering if we’d missed an opportunity.  I think we’d spent more time talking ourselves out of it, rather than really looking at it as an opportunity.

Then another Kiwi couple friends also returned to NZ – this time from Oman.  I was happy to see them post the obligatory social media photo, sipping champagne in the EK lounge, but I also felt an intense pang that again, we’d missed out.  It’s hard wanting to do something, but it not be physically possible.  This must say something about the entitled people we’ve become – when we can simply throw money at a situation and make it so.

We started looking seriously at the options open to us.  With neither of us having automatic entitlement to enter the others’ country we had to weigh up whether it would make sense to look at UK or NZ, and the initial elimination of COVID in NZ and the additional freedom to move around that this would bring gave NZ a big advantage.  New Zealand, on balance, made more sense but it did not prove straightforward to find out how to make this happen.  When we initially started looking at flight options we searched and booked a flight on Etihad via Abu Dhabi and Sydney, but this was soon rescheduled, cancelled, then re-booked for October(!)  In the meantime, a flight that the Indian Government put on to bring Indians from NZ back to India announced that they would be selling seats for Kiwis wanting to return home.  The Indians have been pretty proactive at bringing their citizens back. Interestingly, as well as flights, they have also used Indian navy ships to bring citizens home from Maldives, Iran and UAE.  We managed to get a couple of seats on the flight heading to Auckland, and flew to Delhi yesterday to catch it tonight.

The whole process hasn’t been quite as simple as that may sound. The main challenge was who NZ would allow on this flight, due to the limited government Managed Isolation (MI) facilities that all returning passengers must go through, and whether immediate family would be allowed.  Helen was able to get an exemption visa to enter NZ but because of the approaching General Election in NZ, we were worried that the intense public scrutiny of these facilities might make this Air India flight fly empty to NZ.  There was a couple of nail biting weeks when we weren’t sure if the flight would go ahead, if they would be allowed to accept outbound passengers… and further uncertainty when a small COVID cluster broke out in Auckland.

We’re expecting the trip home to be a bit of an adventure, but don’t worry, we’ll share some snaps and anecdotes about it!  We will have to go into managed isolation upon arrival but of course we have some ideas for some adventures upon release!

We expect to be away from Aroha for about six months.  It remains unknown how easy it will be to return to Aroha to continue our adventure, but who can plan that far ahead these days?!

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