It was sheer relief more than anything that I felt as my plane landed at Alexandria airport on Egypt’s north coast. Relief, not just at the end of an exceedingly stressful day’s travel but to finally be away from England.
With my years of travelling experience, the process of negotiating international airports has become largely mundane but doing so under the demands of the Covid travel regime was almost my undoing. If you are considering following in my footsteps, rather than remaining in the comfortable embrace of your sofa, you’d be advised to consider my experience before you tap in a destination on the Skyscanner search bar.
Before even the practical details there is the moral one: should I even be travelling during a pandemic? As with so many discussions around the Coronavirus, if it was substantially more virulent and deadly it wouldn’t require even an instant of reflection before concluding with a resounding no. If my Twitter feed is anything to go by, plenty of others had already reached this conclusion for a whole variety of reasons: from personal safety concerns to the condemnation of white, western arrogance and hubris to even have such a thought. None of these I dismissed lightly, least of all the possibility of taking the virus with me as unwanted baggage to pass on to others. Call me a fool or an arrogant westerner if you will, but after much weighing up of the factors I decided the risks were relatively low. Given that I was aiming for Egypt and everyone else on the plane, like me, would have to be clutching a negative Covid test certificate and wearing a medical mask throughout, I surmised the odds would be in my favour. With the endless debates about the effectiveness of masks and tests in recent months, even this aspect of risk assessment was hardly a rushed decision.
Goodbye to the white cliffs of home
Just getting my grubby paws on a test certificate became a whole saga in itself. Egypt requires a negative test result within 72 hours of arrival, so there was a lot of juggling of flight times and test availability to allow for getting the result in time but retaining some flexibility for flight delays. With fewer flights available than normal the options were limited and many had inordinately long waits for connecting flights:- 12 hours hanging around an airport is dispiriting enough at the best of times but sitting in a potential viral soup for so long was of negligible appeal.
Just a week before departure the local medical centre where I’d booked my test kindly informed me that due to pressures at the laboratory they would have to charge an additional courier fee to get the test done in time, taking the total cost from £175 to around £450!!!! To which my response was, “fuck off”! Expressed in a politely worded email, of course. Or at least it was after three days of phoning a totally unresponsive number before finally getting an appointment an hour and a half away in London. Their service did turn out to be surprisingly more efficient than their phone system thankfully, although they weren’t able to guarantee the result in 48 hours any more due to the lab being overrun. Coincidentally, the doctor taking the test was Egyptian but I wasn’t going to take this as a good omen, this wasn’t a time to get complacent. As it was, two days later, the negative test result arrived just as my train was pulling into Gatwick airport, but my relief proved to be short-lived.
Computers may be the ultimate expression of logic, breaking everything down into a series of simple binary choices but it rarely appears that way to me. Consequently it should have been of little surprise to me when, for whatever random reason, the certificate refused to download from the email, regardless of how many times I tried or how much I swore at it. After this and futile attempts at contacting the clinic and the lab, I suddenly realised I was late for boarding and as luck would have it my gate was far away down endless corridors and escalators. Wheezing, close to heart failure and sweatier than an obese jogger on a tropical marathon, I staggered up to the boarding desk to be graced with the view of my bag being unloaded from the plane. Mercifully, the lovely lady at the desk radioed through and caught them just in time to reload it, but thirty seconds later and it would have all been over. Panting and sticky I collapsed into my seat, having avoided all eye contact on my walk of shame down the aisle. As we taxied to the runway to the announcement demanding we turn off all electronic devices, it suddenly occurred to me to forward the email to my brother in the hope that he could download the certificate. To add insult to injury I chose this moment to embark upon a mini coughing fit to put the planeload of Covid wary passengers at ease for their flight. My eyes remained firmly downwards in abject humiliation until the plane was safely airborne.
Upon landing at the half-way stage of Milan airport, my initial relief at finding the certificate forwarded from my brother was again dashed against the rocks of inevitability, like a Greek fisherman pounding the last vestiges of life from a freshly caught octopus. Egypt insists on a printed copy of the Covid certificate and Wizz Air wouldn’t let me on the plane without one. There was precious little time between flights as it was, so after a panicked 40 minutes staggering around the airport, with my backpack and non existent Italian, in search of a functioning printer I was ready for an oxygen tent, when finally the nice lady at the Aeroflot desk came to my rescue. I gasped, “grazie, spaseeba”, to cover all the bases of linguistic gratitude only one minute later to be stung with the predictable additional charge for baggage at the check-in desk. Providing means of accepting payment at the check-in desk was obviously a business expense too far for Wizz Air, so I had to join a queue at another counter to pay, with time to take off ticking away. The largely paper based system ensured that this process ground on at a pace that would have reduced a glacier to exasperation.
With the PLANE BOARDING sign flashing in red, I summoned my few remaining molecules of energy in a shuffling run towards passport control, only to be greeted by a queue of at least a hundred other passengers. I was about to give up and sink to the floor in tears when a young couple, equally stressed, opted to push past everyone to fast track themselves to the front. Fighting my very English upbringing and DNA I followed this entirely unnatural behaviour, sounding as apologetic as possible with copious, “scuzi, sorry…sorry”, to politely barge my way to the passport counter. With a couple of minutes to spare I again collapsed into my seat panting and sticky.
A well deserved mango and yoghurt smoothie to celebrate my arrival in Egypt
Previously, my travels had always been entirely motivated by pull factors, I’d never been running away from anything but this time the push factors were equally at play. The restrictions on socialising due to the pandemic were at least attenuated during the summer, as it’s the one time of year that even in Britain there’s at least some chance that it might not be too cold, wet and windy to meet people outdoors. But with winter and a second wave looming, the prospect of months of tedium, interspersed with episodes of tension in enclosed spaces just to see anyone was, frankly just too miserable to contemplate.
Tarnishing all this even further was that it would have to be endured under a government of limitless incompetence and blatant corruption, who’s only response to criticism has been to lie with such casual abandonment it’s made Trump look like a paragon of virtue. The lies have gushed forth with such ease you could see them setting up scapegoats for the inevitable failure of their policies even at the time of their announcement. The callous disregard for the mounting body count would have been bad enough during war but in peacetime it can only be regarded as outright psychopathic. I’ve never been a fan of any government I’ve had to live under but this lot of loathsome cretins are without doubt the worst of my entire life and I’ve yet to meet anyone who disagrees with me, except online and I doubt if my life would be enriched in the slightest by contesting their judgment.
Goodbye to the rolling hillsides of England
One further ominous spectre glowered over the scene, that of Brexit. Whilst I had no problem with the basic principle of leaving the European Union, as there was much about it I disliked, to have the process underwritten by the aforementioned, lumbering political ogres was utterly objectionable. Particularly as they were often cheered on from the sidelines by a pack of racist thugs, enthralled by a mythical vision of an imperial Britain of the past, who the government were only too happy to pander to.
Time and time again on my travels in the last few years, dumbfounded people have asked me what we were doing leaving the EU. Only one foreigner I ever discussed the subject with saw it as a potentially positive thing and he was struggling to disguise his overt racism among a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic crowd around the table in a hostel in the Dominican Republic. That mercifully rare breed of travelling bigot who you wonder why they ever left their home town, let alone their country.
Frankly, I’ve simply lost faith in the ability of my country to act in a way that even remotely reflects my values. The coordinated character assassination on the leader of the opposition party, Jeremy Corbyn, in the last few years by the establishment, media, military and intelligence services, with the subsequent election loss last year, taught me that no government I would want in power will ever be permitted to win an election in the UK. The craven submission of the media to establishment narratives has led to lies so vast and numerous being accepted as uncontestable fact that there seems no hope of the general public rejecting the status quo. Only the young, who have embraced movements like Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion give me any hope that one day a new generation might change things.
Who knows what the coming year will bring? At the moment I’m viewing it as more of extended stays with African friends than full on travel, given the potential risks. Africa has proved to be the continent the least affected by the pandemic, not that it’s received received much praise for this outcome. I’m pretty sure it won’t always be easy but it has to be better than spending it under the grey skies of England. It is not my country anymore. I have moved beyond shame, it is simply a place I want nothing to do with, beyond it being a home to some dear friends.
The world is my home.
