Travelling in 2021

Boy, travel is a lot different than it was two years ago, huh?

Recently, I did the unthinkable and travelled from one of the safest places in the world right now, to a place that is in the middle of another wave of Covid cases. Apart from not being able to travel outside of New Zealand easily, life there is pretty normal. There are no restrictions on domestic travel, people don't really need to wear masks (outside of on public transportation) and signing in to places is optional. Sarawak is different. Masks are mandatory everywhere. Everyone needs to sign in and take their temperature before being able to enter into indoor public places. Currently, the state is under a movement control order where intercity movement is restricted and there is a 10pm curfew in place. Needless to say, I wouldn't have made the trip if it wasn't vitally important to get here. I was prepared for how shitty and stressful travelling would be, but even still, the actual thing was far worse than I expected. 

Booking tickets

I began looking for tickets in January. I booked flights on my two preferred routes to Kuching, one via Singapore on Singapore Airlines (SIA), and one via KL on Malaysian Airlines (MAS). Between these two tickets, there were a total of 8 changes, which included MAS cancelling their flight. At least they had a simple refund process and I eventually got my money back. 

I was more hopeful for the SIA flight, as Changi is a bigger hub and presumably there would be more travellers from NZ who would be transiting in Singapore on their way to other destinations. More worrisome was the flight from Singapore to Kuching, which is a once a week flight that did get rescheduled once. I also needed to do an emergency last minute rescheduling from the almost empty food court of the international terminal of Auckland airport, after my entry into Sarawak was denied for the third time. I booked my flight back to Christchurch while eating comfort McDonalds at 10pm.  

Getting permission to enter Sarawak

Sarawak is one of two Malaysian states that have autonomy when it comes to immigration matters. This meant that I needed to meet the requirements set out by the state government not the national government. These requirements are listed online in English, but are not super detailed. While the requirement for the validity of Covid tests done for entry into West Malaysia is specified in hours before the first flight of the journey, Sarawak's requirements were expressed in days before entry into Sarawak. This is important, because before I could enter into Sarawak, I needed to travel for 26 hours (10 hour flight, 11 hour transit in Changi....plus 5 hours getting up to and waiting in Auckland). This made timing very tight for getting a test in Christchurch and have it meet time criteria. I called the government helpline and was informed by a very insistent lady that I needed to take the test on Friday if I was entering Sarawak on Sunday. This gave me a window of about 34 hours from when I could first take the test until the time I flew out to Auckland. All the places in Christchurch where pre-flight tests were available gave a time of 24-48 hours for the results to be ready. So, I basically made my decision on where to get my test done on the basis of the one that advertised that they could quickly email out the results. This was a mistake, as I should have based it on if the test was signed off by a doctor, as this was a requirement (but was not listed anywhere on the official website). So while I got my first test results in time, it came in the form of a bodgy-looking word document that could have been easily falsifiable, and was just signed by some random person without a title. I was pretty dismayed when I saw it, but it did have all the information about the test and the lab it was done in, plus it was obviously too late to get another test done. I tried to apply three times using that crappy fit to fly certificate, but was rejected each time (at least the applications were reviewed quickly). The last one came after I had already arrived in Auckland, so yeah, that really sucked. I rescheduled my flight for three weeks later. It would have been safer to have tried to fly again as soon as possible, but I was pretty drained and didn't want to face all that again straight away. 

Long story short, three weeks later I went to a better place, which provided a certificate that met requirements. I actually had to call them up and beg to get a hard copy of the results on time, which I scanned and sent off. I was successful, which was great. However, just a reminder that at that time, there were no cases of Covid in the community in New Zealand. I would not have been able to get Covid if I tried.  

I am partially at fault for not trying to get more detail on what constituted a valid test in the eyes of the Sarawak government, and for assuming that a medical clinic in Christchurch wouldn't take $180 of my money and provide a really piss-poor service. My test results from the Riccarton Clinic did meet requirements and looked professional, so I can recommend them for that. Obviously, I am somewhat salty at the other place, and attribute some blame to them. Finally, I think the Sarawak government could have done a lot better with setting entry requirements. There is a tendency to be overly restricted and heavy-handed in the absence of greater research and understanding. Their policy was obviously designed primarily for people travelling from other parts of Malaysia to Sarawak, which is fine, but you can't make it almost impossible to travel from further away. Also, a more compassionate and reasonable response to my first application would have been to accept that there was basically a 0% chance I contracted Covid in New Zealand, and grant me entry, despite the crap test document I had.

Getting to Singapore

Checking in to the flight to Singapore was fine. I don't have airline status anymore, so needed to line up to check-in with everyone else. At this point, I was still riding a wave of supreme relief that I had entry permission granted, so I wasn't too fussed about that. Someone came around and took a temperature scan of everyone. Listening to the other folks waiting in line, it seemed like most people were travelling on to the UK. I listened in amusement to a pretty self-entitled middle-aged Caucasian lady insisting that she should get on an earlier connecting flight to the UK, because she didn't want to wait in Changi. The request was fine, but the way she expressed it was fairly rude. I feel for the staff dealing with air travellers during normal times, it must be much worse now given that travellers have to deal with more hassle and stress travelling. There is also the small matter of potentially being exposed to the virus on a repeated basis. There was a friendly young staff member at the head of the queue who was asking everyone where they were headed off to and making some small talk. When she asked me, I said "Kuching" and she had a look that was surprised and amused. There was no further chat after that. The rest of checking in was fine. I got both of my boarding passes and headed up to immigration.

Immigration was fine too. The staff at the security check were friendly and in good spirits. This is not normally the case. My bags were tested for explosives, because they always are in New Zealand and Australia. It really is a funny coincidence that I always get "randomly" selected. Again, I was too relieved to actually be travelling to be too annoyed about it. Plus, it was a non-Caucasian young man that did the testing. Can't be mad when the person doing it is probably subjected to it themselves.

I get through the security check and find a place to wait out the time before boarding. I notice another Caucasian/non-Caucasian split among the travellers there. Basically all the non-Caucasians were wearing masks and almost all the Caucasian folk weren't. 

My flight was fairly uneventful. One of the benefits of a global pandemic to a long-haul international flight is the airline occupancy rates. I would guess that the plane was at about 10% capacity. So I got a row of seats to myself (almost everyone did). I managed to get an hour or two sleep in a relatively horizontal position. The hour or two of sleep is usually pretty important, as there is a huge difference between some sleep and none, especially when you need to spend several hours waiting for your next flight. Which takes me on to:

11 hours in zombie Changi

I have written about my love for Changi airport before. It is hands down the best airport I have ever been to. Normally, a several hour layover in Changi is at worst, an okay experience and at best, a very enjoyable one. This was not normal Changi. This was Changi during Singapore lockdown, where there had been Covid clusters at the airport not long prior. So most of the airport was closed down and empty. Interestingly enough, it had the same smell that Kuching airport sometimes has, a musty smell of the carpets not being vacuumed often enough. I was pretty hungry at that stage, so I went off in search of food. That proved to be very difficult. Only two of the four terminals were in use, and there were only a couple of places in each that were open. Terminal One looked like this:

If you have ever been to Changi, you would know that this is bizarrely empty. 

There was a big catch when it came to trying to get something to eat. One needed to digitally sign in at food places first. This involves using the Singapore tracker app to scan a QR code to sign in. Fair enough, that is reasonable. However, after downloading the app, I found out that you needed to have some sort of immigration status with Singapore in order to register. This was punctuated with an exclamation mark in the app. "Please enter Singapore first!" (or something of that nature, I am paraphrasing). I took the exclamation to be friendly rather than hostile. But, this didn't help me. I couldn't register because I hadn't entered Singapore, and I couldn't enter Singapore. So I couldn't get food. This is a far cry from previous trips where you could enter into the country for a few hours just to eat at the excellent Changi staff food courts that are landside.

I was very grateful that Jane-o had the foresight to pack stuff to eat in my bag. I ate a bag of 12 mini-peanut slabs and 6 mini beef jerky sticks. Of course, all that sugar and sodium made me feel ill, but it was better than starving. It also made me aware of another objective I had in Changi, which was not to get sick before my next flight. You don't need to get Covid to get a fever and a cough, and having those would have been extremely problematic at that point in time. Thankfully, despite my elevated stress levels and a lack of sleep and proper food, I managed to stay healthy.

Flight to Kuching 

I thought my flight to Kuching would be almost completely empty, and it would have been if it weren't for a reasonable number of Mainland Chinese workers also taking the flight. Overall, this flight was probably about 10-15% full. Some of the Chinese dudes were wearing full-body protection, like plastic covering every part of their body, wearing both a face mask and a face shield, while also donning goggles and gloves. 

I was hoping for food on the flight (it was a Scoot flight, so this wasn't guaranteed), and I was treated to a strawberry croissant (bad croissant with really artificial-tasting jam inside), which I wolfed down. There was also a can of coke and a cornflake Ritter Sport. I was pleasantly surprised by the inclusion of European chocolate, but after a day of peanut slabs, I was in no mood for more chocolate.

Nothing else much to say about the flight to Kuching. Once I was on the plane, I was fairly relaxed. Regardless of what happened from that point on, I was going to be in Kuching. 

Going through immigration in Kuching

I was sitting near the middle of the plane, but I managed to pass several people by power-walking and ended up near the front of the queue. They separated us up into two lines (local and non-local) and hooked us up with a wristband with a QR code and got us to scan in using the Malaysian tracking app. The whole thing was a slow process. I won't go through all the details, but it seemed like everything was being done thoroughly. I also noted how just a few new physical barriers can change a very familiar place into somewhere that feels very different. I was given a few instructions and filled in some forms. I signed something and then went through immigration. I always feel really happy coming back to Kuching as a Sarawakian. It is a completely different thing from entering into the country as Malaysian in Kuala Lumpur. The Kuching airport staff are generally a lot more friendly and happy to communicate in English, rather than be annoyed that I don't speak Malay.   

I didn't have any check-in luggage, so I was the first to exit landside. I was instructed to start another queue to get on the buses to go to the hotels. This was around 8-9 pm, and I was hoping that I would get dinner (was still starving). We had to wait a while for the buses to leave, which they did in a convoy with a police car (police lights on) leading the way. For some reason, there were only 6 people on my bus, and we stopped by 3 hotels, of which mine was the last.

Arrival at the quarantine hotel

The super friendly bus driver took a picture of me in front of the hotel as proof that I had been delivered. I checked in, which involved more signing in to stuff. I got my room key and headed up to my room. When I arrived, I was very happy to see this:

and this:

and this was a nice bonus:

That last photo doesn't do the view justice, but I have plenty more that I took over the ensuing two weeks that I will post. 

After failing to make it to Kuching three weeks earlier, I had been having dreams about lying on a hotel bed and feeling relieved that it was over. Every time I would snap back to reality, so it felt pretty surreal to just be there and have that great weight lifted off of me. It is a feeling that I hope I will always remember, as I don't think I have ever felt that grateful for something in my life.