Freedom Day by Elizabeth Obadina

Towelling Solitary Confinement Companions

Today is Freedom Day for my cousin. She was released at the stroke of midnight and re-united with her husband and son whom she’d last seen early last December. Her chunky, white- plastic, electronic bracelet-tag was cut off and she was allowed to leave her hotel after three long weeks of imprisonment.

For three weeks she had been kept in her room in solitary confinement. An alarm sounded if she ventured into the corridor where she would risk arrest. Although it was an up-market hotel every meal had been delivered to her door in black plastic boxes on a tray. She had become very weary of this diet although occasionally her husband was allowed to leave fresh fruit and other essentials at a drop-off point at the front of the hotel.

What had been her crime? 

She had travelled in the middle of a pandemic.

She was a traveller from the United Kingdom at a time when the ‘British variant’ of COVID 19 was ripping through populations worldwide. Unlike us, who talk coyly of the ‘Kent’ variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the rest of the world calls it the ‘British’ variant and some nations have taken extreme measures to stop this most unwelcome tourist from entering their country. China, Australia and New Zealand are some such places. And the most extreme measure has been to quarantine – at the traveller’s expense – all arrivals from all places at all ports of entry.

My cousin had been quarantined.

She had travelled in early December out of Hong Kong and home to the UK to see her Mum, her Dad, her eldest student son and her middle son who was home schooling with his grandparents. She hadn’t seen any of them for a long time and decided to make the Christmas round trip even though she knew she would have to quarantine for 10 days upon her return to Hong Kong in the New Year. But whilst she was away the rules changed.

No one from the plague stricken isles of Great Britain was allowed into Hong Kong – at all. Any traveler arriving in Hong Kong had to show evidence of residence in a low-COVID-19 country for at least three weeks before setting off to Hong Kong – and even then arrivals faced an increased period of quarantine in a hotel upon arrival. These hotels had to be pre-booked and many of the most preferred places of incarceration became rare like gold dust.

My cousin ummed and awed hoping that the rules might be relaxed, hoping that she wouldn’t have to spend three weeks on an expensive solitary holiday in a low risk country, like say, the Seychelles, in order to be able to get on a flight back home. The airlines flying into Hong Kong became super authoritarian checking everyone’s papers, checking every t was crossed, checking every PCR test was kosher and perfectly timed, checking every traveler’s movements to see where they had been because should a traveler be found to have stayed in a high COVID-19 risk country or be found to test positive for COVID 19 after entering Hong Kong the entire operations of that hapless airline would be immediately closed down … as indeed has happened, just now, to some airlines flying in from India and carrying infected passengers. The umming and awing carried over into the New Year, into Britain’s third lockdown and into Spring. Eventually, armed with all the information gleaned from a mushrooming ‘What’s App’ group of Hong Kong residents and citizens marooned around the world, my cousin bit the bullet, emptied her savings account and set off on her odyssey back home – via Dubai, which was, when she left the UK,  a ‘safe-country’.

There was a lot of nervousness that Dubai might be added to Hong Kong’s or the UK’s naughty red list forcing passengers in transit to turn back to the UK – assuming that the UK would then accept back travelers from Dubai without them being quarantined. Such are the unpredictable, shifting sands of coronavirus regulation making in 2021. Happily some Dubai residents, mindful of the influx of ‘involuntary, in-transit tourists’ to the desert kingdom, opened their homes to the unforeseen guests and my cousin was able to break the loneliness of her three week Dubai hotel stay with an unexpected and delightful holiday with a friendly family. Dubai proved OK.  The final leg of her voyage home was less so.

Landing in Hong Kong in the middle of the night, being marshalled to COVID-19 airport testing stations, waiting hours for the results which would determine either supervised, onward passage to one’s chosen quarantine hotel or perhaps an unfortunate one-way trip to a COVID-19 isolation hospital is not the happiest way to arrive anywhere. But such are the trials and tribulations of travelling in the early 2020s.

Now, today, after three weeks of watching the world go by from her high-rise hotel room; after three weeks of not being allowed out for exercise; after three weeks of ‘working from home’ that wasn’t home at all, but had internet access to make her confinement bearable; after three weeks of waving like a princess imprisoned in a tall tower to her princely husband and son on the pavement far below; after three weeks of making a new toweling companion every day; after three weeks of this and seven negative PCR tests later; after almost seven weeks of leaving her parents’ home she is back in her own home. Today my cousin can savour freedom of a sort. But freedom in Hong Kong these days is freedom constrained and curtailed, but that’s another freedom story. For the moment her odyssey is over but it will be a long time before my cousin embarks on her next trip home to see her parents and sons. And for many travelers, many split-families, many residents and citizens of COVID blighted nations all over the world,  ‘Freedom Day’, which now feels so real and within our grasp in the UK, is still a mirage on the far horizon of most people's post Covid-19 world.

Wednesday 28^th April 2021