Flight Anxiety
Being only our third international trip in 18 months, I surprised myself with just how anxious I was at the thought of getting back on a plane. The ever-evolving Covid testing and quarantine requirements was making the hair on my neck stand on end – booking tests in the UK, uploading results and declarations to the Indian travel health portal, complying with requirements for a brief stop off in Dubai, more tests on arrival and possible quarantine – and the fear of messing up one step and being denied onward passage. Additionally, flying into India on a one-way ticket and planning to leave on a yacht is a common challenge to cruisers and needs explaining and documentary proof on check in. And bizarrely, British citizens aren’t entitled to Indian E-visas, so Helen needed a trip to the one of the visa application centres (Cardiff) to apply for her Indian visa a couple of weeks prior to departure.
The thought of catching Covid has never really bothered either of us, especially since being triple jabbed. Rather, the inconvenience of a positive test and the ensuing quarantine or isolation is more concerning. I feel that it impacts our gypsy-esque lifestyle more than someone in regular employment and housing.
Travel never used to be this challenging! Wasn’t there a time when it was fun, exciting, or even exotic?! For a period of about five years, I travelled extensively from Dubai for work. I loved overseeing luxury hotel developments in some pretty cool places, and most weeks I was on at least a couple of planes with business trips varying from a single day up to three weeks – with an average of around three days. Business travel has always flattered me – that my clients value my professional input such that they fly me around and put me up in nice hotels for the privilege. With projects throughout MENA (Middle East and North Africa) I also got to go to some pretty off beat places that probably wouldn’t normally find their way onto my itinerary – like Equatorial Africa, Nigeria or Yemen.
As we became more environmentally aware, I become more ashamed of my travel environmental footprint. Travel was paid for by different clients and sometimes booked direct, meaning that it was rare that I was able to pay to offset emissions. We’ve been happy to greatly reduce our travel and corresponding footprint size.
We’ve been asked many times in the past couple of years if we yearn to return to Dubai. I’ve felt a little embarrassed to admit that beyond seeing friends still living there, I don’t have a strong pull. Embarrassed, because since it was home for so long, I feel like I should maybe hold a greater loyalty for the city. Helen had been ready to leave a few years before me, but we stayed on because I was loving my job so much and because we were able to stash away some cash to make our leaving-the-corporate-world dream come true. So when we did leave, the timing was spot on.
The only other reason I’d thought I’d like to return is to visit some of my projects, to see how they look as open, operating hotels. But, that’s almost a reason not to go – I’ve spent way too much time over the past decade looking at posh hotels! When I left my job in Dubai, I realised that it was the people that I missed the most. I’d developed great relationships with clients and colleagues that I enjoyed working with on a daily basis, but also the design and construction community. Dubai is a huge bustling city, but after a few years, your industry can start to feel like a friendly village where everyone knows each other. It’s taken over a year, but now I’ve started to miss the work I was doing in hotel projects.
Helen opted to spend our 13 hour Dubai layover in a Sleep Pod – something like a first class airline seat, tucked away in a quiet part of the airport. I took the opportunity to leave the airport and catch up with a couple of good friends. If we’d managed to keep to the “original plan”, we would have expected to have seen them by now, but over two years is too long to not see good friends! True to Dubai expectations, I was collected from the airport in a convertible Porsche, and returned in a desert-conquering Land Cruiser!
I only had a couple of hours, but I was well impressed with my brief visit to the Dubai Expo 2020. I realised early on in my own architecture career – maybe even during my studies – that even though I loved good design, I wasn’t going to be the one producing it! Expo has over 100 country pavilions as well as larger ones focusing on universal values such as a sustainability, accessibility or opportunity. And of course, each pavilion is striving to outdo each other with stunning design. My only regret was not visiting at night time – the lighting effects must be incredible.
What was underwhelming though was the actual content of most of the pavilions I visited – showcasing mundane exports or tourist tat. I’m glad the architects rose to the challenge, even if the content providers didn’t.
After the whistle-stop catch up visit in Dubai, landing back in Kochi, India felt a bit surreal. I’m sure that landing at 3am with no real sleep for two days contributed to this but it also felt very familiar, almost like we were coming home. We’d spent eight months of 2020 in India – three months of amazing overland travel, then five months of one sort of Covid lockdown or another. Our good friend Varghese met us at the airport with a big grin on his face. He’s done a great job of looking after Aroha during our 18 month absence and it’s great to see him again. I was feeling a bit pessimistic about the thought of being in or travelling within India. Many of the things I loved – crowded temples and markets, overnight bus and train journeys, mixing with endless friendly locals – all seems to have a lot less sheen than before. At the height of Covid-craziness in 2020, we found that locals stopped asking us “where are you from?” in the familiar inquisitive, conversation-starter way, and more in an accusative way. Foreigners were guilty of bringing Covid to India and we were easy targets. I’m pleased to have experienced a return to the pre-Covid, friendly intonation!
But this visit isn’t about being a tourist again. Our focus is on getting Aroha ship shape and ready to cross an ocean, before our 30 day visas expire and the monsoon season sets in. What we are seeing of India now is restricted to the local area around the marina on various missions to get what we need to be able to leave, though this time with Aroha. We have a lot to do, and a tight deadline to get jobs done. More in the next blog about how we get on…
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