A Quarantine Yarn

Over the years I have written about bus ride adventures through the Saharan desert from Dakar to Bamako.  I wrote about my Mongolian horse mishaps, unpasteurized cheese and a Trans-Siberian trip from Beijing to Moscow.  I have travel journals that detail my pick-up truck ride from Thailand to Cambodia during monsoon season and an almost doomed ferry trip across Lake Malawi with my godson.  I have been detained on a train going into the former Yugoslavia and derailed on a train going through the jungles of Ghana.  All this to say, I have had some wild adventures around the globe and experiences that will forever weave their way into late night travel tales around the firepit over good Scotch.  But in my many wanderings I am not sure I have had an adventure quite like this quarantine yarn.  It is just getting started, and I need to write about. 

And in turn, you can decide if you want to read about it!    

In December Hong Kong implemented a 21-day quarantine in response to the growing concerns over the various strains of the virus that are emerging around the globe.  Hong Kong has managed COVID-19 extremely effectively with 11,635 known cases and 209 deaths to date.  They are unapologetic about their rigorous approach to containment which is understandable considering the US has had 31.6 million cases and 566 thousand deaths to date. 

That said, much like the fact that I never thought someone would steal my passport on a local bus in Costa Rica while reading Harry Potter’s the Prisoner of Azkaban or that the local authorities would mistake my colleague and me as spies in Gabon, it really never occurred to me that I would in any way have to engage in such a draconian quarantine.  

Last Monday night, I had two Makers and diets and sat at a rooftop bar in Los Angeles with my soul mate where I spent my last evening outdoors as I made my way to LAX to begin a late-night journey back to Hong Kong to reunite with a companion who completes me!  The last time I saw Andrei was on January 3rd as he returned to work and I tended to my sweet Mom.  

In theory I knew what I was getting into.  In the same way that I knew that the road into South Sudan might not be without bumps.  But as I sit here penning this latest travel blog, I am not certain I knew exactly what this entailed (again, much like South Sudan)!  My family and friends, on the other hand, seemed to have had a sense.  There have been bets waged and predictions made of exactly what might happen to me under a 21-day compulsory quarantine.  I know who you are…son!  There are people in my life watching CNN each day just to see if there is an international incident that captures footage of some gangly blond-haired guy in running shorts, a pair of Newtons and a Batman shirt trying to crawl out of his window on the 16th floor of his hotel in Wan Chai.  

And while I don’t expect that will happen, let me tell you briefly about my journey and what I have learned along the way!  And with this yarn, I am just scratching the surface!  

I boarded Cathay Airlines after an hour of rigorous review of all of my travel papers.  Just to board my flight, here is what I needed to have in place:

• Proof of residence and my diplomatic passport. 
• An official report of my nucleic acid COVID test with a negative result taken within 72-hours of departure along with another official document stating that the lab that provided this result is certified as ISO15189. 
• Documentation that I was booked at one of the “designated hotels in Hong Kong for no less than 21 nights starting on the day of your arrival.”

After some calls back and forth to Hong Kong they affirmed that I was indeed eligible to board Cathay flight 8934 departing LAX at 12:30 a.m.  As a person who stresses very little over travel, I have to tell you that your anxiety builds as you are going through this incredible scrutiny, when you start to think not about whether they are going to let you board but what awaits you when you land! 

An almost empty 777 takes off from Los Angeles on time and lands in Hong Kong 14 hours later just after 6 in the morning.  And as I disembarked from the plane into an airport that has become so familiar to me over the years for its pulsating energy and exotic international appeal, I entered a space that was ghostly quiet and filled with a series of stations that move you from one section to the next as your temperature is taken, your arrival COVID test is administered, your papers are screened and scanned, your wrist band is attached, and your compulsory quarantine papers are issued. 

 Okay folks, this part is surreal!  Groggy from 14 hours in flight, you can’t help but think back to that Steven King book that describes a macabre and unsettling reality that you hope is merely a figment of your imagination!  I am walking through one of the world’s busiest airports where there are no planes taking off, no restaurants and shops open, and no announcements being made about a delayed flight to Singapore or a gate change for the flight departing to New Delhi. Everyone who greets you is suited up in PPE which as stated by Wikipedia is “protective clothing, helmets, goggles, or other garments or equipment designed to protect the wearer's body from injury or infection.”  Instead of an airline attendant at the gate waiting to direct you to your next flight, you are greeted by someone in a hazmat suit.   

For three hours you wait for your results in an assigned desk neatly spaced out six feet apart from your neighbor at one of the gates now reassigned for arriving passengers.  Think Clockwork Orange.

It is eerily quiet and three hours later the entire class of this cohort of 30 passengers receives their results and assuming negative (which mine was thank God), you are escorted through customs, immigration and onto a bus to your assigned hotel.  My luggage is sanitized and upon arrival at the Dorsett, I am methodically checked-in and quickly escorted to room 1609 where my quarantine commences.  My quarantine orders note that on the 4th of May at 23:59, I can then leave my room and proceed to the lobby where I will then check out.  A violation of the quarantine is punishable by $25,000 in fines and 6 months in prison.  Not quite worth a midnight run on Bowen Road!  

Five days in and it is a beautiful Sunday in Hong Kong.  My breakfast this morning was:

• Scrambled Egg | Ham
• Dainish Pastry | Cucumber
• Green Salad | Buttered Corn
• Orange Juice

Lunch will be sweet and sour pork and tonight I will feast on stir-fried beef noodles with vegetables and seasonal fresh fruit.  The food is quite good and any food in Hong Kong just tastes better than anywhere else in the world, I think. 

I am alive and well and my room is now fully equipped with a treadmill, a portable stair stepper (thank you Paul), and my spin bike.  There is a bottle of Makers and a six pack of diet coke in the mini fridge.  I have gummy bears, Gatorade and Goldfish. I run seven miles a day, step 300 steps and spin for 20-30 minutes.  For those of you who bet that I wouldn’t last three days, pay up!  And I should get 20%!  

Here is what I know so far: 

The world has changed.  More than we realize.  Rules have been rewritten and privileges and free passes don’t necessarily apply by your passport designation or country of origin. And it is still changing.  Rapidly.

I am ridiculously privileged.  My worst day is most people’s best.  I am in a four-star hotel for 21-days where a proper meal is delivered every four hours.  I exercise, go to virtual meetings, watch Netflix and facetime with friends and family.  I have clean running water and a great shower.  I think about all of the women and children I have worked with in the slums of Katanga who would gladly and instantaneously switch places and forgo their ability to walk outside for what I have in my 8x8 hotel room. 

I am ridiculously grateful for my friends and family.  There has not been an hour where I don’t receive a sweet text, a Whatsapp, a curious daily fact, or a fun picture from people who I love.  I have talked to friends in Saudia Arabia, London, Uganda, Nigeria, and Mexico.  This experience in just the short time I have been here has made me so self-aware (and I thought I was before) of the amazing people that I have in my life.  

This experience will change me.  I really didn’t calculate how something like this could change you. It has already done that for me, and I am five days in as I reflect and engage and move about this earth in a way that I have never done before in my entire life.  

I had ice cream with a family that is very dear to me in San Francisco today before I started penning this and I found myself with a need to write about my adventure.  In the past five days, in addition to four very full days of work, I have run 35 miles, completed five 7-minute workouts, climbed 800 steps, and cycled 15 miles.  I finished Mornings on Horseback and am reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Churchill: Walking with Destiny and Paul Farmer’s To Repair the World.  I am half-way through Queen’s Gambit and just finished the podcast on Lady Bird Johnson In Plain Sight.

And as I sign out, I do so with two final thoughts.  I am here in quarantine because I want to be not because I have to be.  I came home voluntarily and enthusiastically to be with my husband who serves our country and believes with all of his heart in equity and compassion and democracy.  He is one of the greatest men I know, and he inspires me, and I would sit here for 221 days if I had to (but would prefer not to).  

And I am more grateful than I ever have been before in my life.  For my friends, my sweet sister and my dad and my son and his loving partner.  I am looking out my window past the Hong Kong Jockey Club and beyond the looming Hong Kong skyline into a world that is absolutely beautiful and mysterious… but more uncertain than ever.  

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Much love…jamie