Before our trip, when people asked what I was most nervous about in regards to the upcoming year, I always said I was most nervous about the uncontrollable things. Well, unfortunately that has happened these last three months with the coronavirus. We landed in Bangkok right when the breakout was really picking up steam in Wuhan, but it didn’t really cross our minds and honestly we didn’t see or hear much about it. Following our time in Bangkok we went to Laos where they hadn’t even reported a case, so we really didn’t hear much there either. After Laos we made our way to Vietnam where our friend Joe came over to meet us in Hanoi. We spent about four days in Hanoi before making our way to Sapa, and that’s when we noticed the incredible lack of tourists. Bars, restaurants, and hiking trails were completely empty.
When it really started to get real for us was when we tried making our way back to Cat Ba Island (Caitlin and I had already visited, but were taking Joe). We had booked our accommodation the day before and got on the train to the Halong Bay area where we would be boarding a boat to go to Cat Ba. When we pulled up to the boat area, there were men outside shouting and throwing up X signs with their hands to us and our driver. We got out and didn’t think much of it and the men just said, “no Cat Ba” and pointed us down the road. Weird, but we were used to weird. We finally made our way to a travel agency where a nice young lady informed us that no one was allowed on Cat Ba island starting that very day, because of the virus. Now it was real.
Apparently there’d been a recent spike in coronavirus cases that weekend, all apparently tied to a flight that had come in from the UK earlier in the week. Most of the infected were tourists. Those tourists had then gone on to do tourist things around North Vietnam, therefore exposing most of those regions to the virus. Therefore, tourists were being seen as being potentially contagious, and tourist activities and hotels and popular restaurants were being shut down left and right.
After being informed we couldn’t go to Cat Ba for at least another two weeks, we decided to catch a ride to Halong Bay City where we would stay for a couple of days. Immediately upon exiting the bus a local man came up and chastised us for not wearing masks. EVERYONE in the city appeared to be wearing masks. When we went to our hotel they took our temperatures and went over our travel history before we could enter. That night when we out to find food (on a Saturday), we realized that much of the city seemed to have shut down. After learning that a few hotels and neighborhoods in the city had been shut down and everyone inside mandatory quarantined, we made the decision to hightail it out of that area the next morning, despite having another night’s reservation. The next morning we tried going to a restaurant and they said we couldn’t enter because of the virus. There were plenty of locals in there, so we suspect we were denied entry because we were tourists. It was a strange feeling being essentially blacklisted, and it was more validation that we were doing the right thing by leaving.
We made it back to Hanoi where we were asked a series of questions by our hotel and were given hand sanitizer squirts every time we came and went. The effects aren’t as obvious in a big city like Hanoi because there are still a good number of Western tourists and a larger portion of people not wearing masks, but that doesn’t take away from the overall uneasiness in the air. On our first night back in Hanoi, we ventured out to get some food when we noticed an ambulance a block away from our hotel. There were three people in hazmat suits escorting people out of the hotel into the back of the ambulance and a military truck.
At this point, we were really weighing our options of where we should be going. Australia, southern Vietnam, Bali, and even Hawaii were places that we were considering. When we woke up the next morning though, we saw all the headlines starting to come out of the U.S. about travel bans and also that tens of thousands of people were being quarantined in Vietnam. That’s when we made the difficult, but necessary, decision that we should probably get out of there as soon as possible because who knows how long we might be stuck somewhere if we stayed. Every country was coming out with new travel restrictions and quarantine mandates, and if we were going to be navigating this new societal landscape it would be best to do so at home. So then came the logistics of trying to get out of Vietnam.
To make matters just a bit more complicated, Caitlin and I had some chest congestion that had us worried. Was it the pollution in Hanoi, anxiety, or the virus? To be safe we decided to get tested, which was also scary since we were in Vietnam and the language barrier is just one of the many variables that could make a medical situation a nightmare. We’d also been keeping up with the news that Vietnam had been quarantining lots of tourists, so we were afraid that even if we were to get tested and didn’t have it, we’d end up in a 15 day quarantine at some military barracks. We called the US Embassy in Hanoi and they told us to go to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, so we made our way there. When we got there it was jammed packed with masked individuals who were there for the exact same reason. Seeing the number of people, the ages of some of the individuals, and the state some of them were in, we knew that we would be walking out of there in short order. They had us fill out forms that asked what side affects we were having and where we had been. Next, they took our temperatures and blood pressure and that was it. It was obvious they weren’t going to waste the time and energy on two young people who were not showing severe signs.
After a quick back and forth with a nurse via Google Translate, she told us since we didn’t have fevers we were fine and should go. We walked out of the hospital and decided to book a flight as soon as possible, which meant an end to our dream trip. We found a flight leaving Hanoi that night so we jumped on it. Here’s a quick recap on each airport:
Hanoi and Tokyo - DEAD. There were empty hallways, closed shops, and cancelled flights galore. My sister asked how cool the Tokyo airport was and I said it looked like a zombie apocalypse had struck. In both of these airports I would venture to guess that 90%-95% of people had masks on and there were hand sanitizer bottles at every business and located strategically in airport hallways.
Chicago and Des Moines - LIVELY. Honestly, you would never know there was any type of pandemic happening. Here I would say that 5% of people had masks on at most. While I don’t want to get into the whole ‘mask on vs. mask off’ debate, know that we understand that medical staff need them most and that they don’t necessarily prevent you from getting the virus. But if you think there’s a chance you may already have the virus and you must go out into crowded areas, maybe put a damn mask on even if it looks weird. Probably the most alarming thing was the lack of screening when entering the U.S. No temperature checks. We had been gone for 10 months and not a single page of our passport was looked at. They asked where we came from, if we had been to Europe in the last month and that was the extent of it.
After traveling for 26 straight hours we finally landed back home in Des Moines. Since we had been in heavily affected areas, we made the decision that when we landed we would self quarantine so not to potentially put anyone in harm’s way. Our friend Joe, that traveled with us in Vietnam, arrived one day before us in his home city of Omaha. So when we landed in Des Moines, we grabbed a car that Caitlin’s parents graciously left us (packed with supplies and goodies) and made our way to Omaha to stay at Joe’s house. And that’s where we are at now.
I understand some people are downplaying it, being vocal about not being scared, and making fun of it. But the bottom line is, it has affected a lot of people and continues to do so. Just because it hasn’t directly affected you or anyone you know doesn’t mean it’s not scary. It’s having a massive impact on people’s livelihoods. Remember the empty restaurants, bars, and hotels I mentioned? Someone relies on those jobs to feed their families. Also, if you’re young and know chances are you’ll kick the virus if you get it, that’s not the case with our elderly folks. So keep that in mind when you say it’s the same as the flu or less people have died from it than the flu - that’s not the way elderly people are looking at it.
Ending our trip early has sucked for us. It sucks because our friend came to visit us and experience a country and wasn’t able to as much as we would have liked. It sucks because we weren’t able to make it one year like we had hoped. It sucks because we weren’t able to visit a few places that we were really looking forward to. It sucks that we weren’t able to make a more stable transition back into wrapping our trip up and getting things back in order at home before we arrived.
BUT with all of that said, having to end our trip early means nothing on the grand scale of things. Others are suffering the loss of loved ones, are in fear that this virus could kill them, are directly impacted financially with their inability to work, are being forced to work in high risk circumstances or are having things that they’ve looked forward to for years cancelled completely. We are lucky and blessed to have been able to travel for as long as we did, let alone at all. It’s an unfortunate circumstance that should be taken seriously, and we didn’t want to help the virus proliferate in more and more communities by continuing to hop on and off planes in new countries for the next two months.