Lockdown! (Day 210) — Harmon Family

We had managed to outrun COVID for months, but the virus shut down our trip in New Zealand, which had a tough and early lockdown. We were locked down in one house for 70 days. It was sad to lose the last 1/3 of our trip, but our lockdown was safe and full of family time, so it was fine.

Not surprisingly, the lockdown stories are not that exciting compared to our other adventures. But it was a big deal for us. We stayed in this one house about as long as our first five countries combined. So, this post may be more for the truly committed readers or people who love lockdown stories (and for our own memories)…

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RUNNING FROM THE VIRUS

January 28, 2020 (Day 152)– Suddenly, everyone at our hotel in Thailand started wearing surgical masks all the time.

The virus was not well understood (it didn’t even have a name), and it seemed localized in 1 city in China. Wuhan was under quarantine, with no one coming in or out. On the other hand, we were not that far away from Wuhan, and Thailand had the #2 most cases in the world. Still, Thailand only had 14 confirmed cases in a country of 70m people, so there was only a 1 in 5 million chance that someone we saw had it.

But the other guests were really serious about the masks. They even kept their masks on for family photos! We thought that was really funny, but it also made us feel like they must know something we didn’t know…. We did our research, and decided to take this seriously. Our main concern at the time was that international borders were going to close, so this was the #1 risk to continuing our trip.

We started tracking the coronavirus daily. We were talking about it so much that Hazel decided to do a graph of cases by country. This is from Jan 29, 2020, and it is amazing to look back and see how much the virus grew from here. A real lesson in the power of exponential growth. The USA had only 5 confirmed cases. As we write this, the US has had 24,306,043 total cases. That is a lot more than 5 !!

The good news for us was that we felt safe since we were almost always going to be in small towns and out of the way places. We bought some masks and hand sanitizer, but we didn’t change anything in our itinerary. We did wear masks at tourist sites, border crossings, etc.

Here we are at an airport with our masks. We thought we were so crazy to be wearing masks at the time. We had to take a picture since no one would believe we were wearing masks! We had no idea that we and most people on the planet would be wearing masks in public places for at least a year…

One complication for us was that we were in countries that don’t have a free press, so it was really hard to get good information. You might think there is something wrong with the media in the USA…. Well, Thailand is awesome in many ways, but they actually lock up their own citizens for posting true things on Facebook! While we were there, they imprisoned people for posting things like, “I saw some guy die, and I think he probably had the virus. We should watch out.” They also imprison people for saying anything negative about the King. Really!

The articles in the Thai papers all said there was no cause for alarm…. Completely wrong, of course! We heard about a young Chinese tourist in our little town who died suddenly, maybe from the virus. We couldn’t get a straight answer on her cause of death or even if she was at our hotel ! That made us nervous.

Our next country Laos was even worse for information. Laos doesn’t even pretend to have a free press. When you googled “Laos coronavirus” you got exactly zero articles. Not even articles that lied and said things were fine!

Then we went off to Raja Ampat in eastern Indonesia. Another place where you can’t really trust the media. And another place where you really would not want to be in the hospital ! Actually, most of our countries on the trip were places where you would not feel good about the medical care. But we were going to be on a small boat in the middle of nowhere, so we felt like we would probably not get the virus. We had friends flying in from the USA, and we told them to all wear masks on their long international flights. This seemed like a ridiculous nervous request at the time, but they all did it, which turned out to be a really good thing. We didn’t know that Raja Ampat would be a sort of “last hurrah” for all of us before the lockdowns.

We arrived in New Zealand on February 29 (Day 184). Finally a country with a free press! They said they had zero cases, and we mostly believed them. They could have been wrong (testing isn’t perfect), but at least they weren’t going to be lying about it. And it was the first country in a while with good hospitals. And it was probably the most isolated developed country in the world. And it was summer, since they are in the Southern Hemisphere. We were in a good spot! We didn’t wear masks or worry about the virus because New Zealand had it under control. We had an a fun 22 days in Queenstown…

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LOCKDOWN EARLY AND HARD

The New Zealand government locked down insanely early, insanely fast, and insanely hard.

They shut down the entire country when they had zero deaths, zero cases in the ICU, and only 2 cases of local transmission. Think of the foresight and political will that it took to make this huge decision when there was no major problem in the country.

They communicated it super clearly and quickly. They introduced their lockdown roadmap on a Friday and simultaneously announced immediate moderate restrictions. On Monday, they reminded us of the roadmap and announced that a harder lockdown was effective immediately — with a total lockdown coming in 48 hours. They said you had 2 days to get prepared to stay at home for 25 days minimum —. They went from no public plan to a fully implemented lockdown in under a week. No messing around!

And their lockdown was tough! You were basically not allowed to leave your house. No walks outside your yard. No boats, kayaks, etc. All restaurants were closed, even for takeout. There was basically no Amazon or delivery either (didn’t want warehouse and delivery people to catch it). You were not allowed to drive around unless you were going to the grocery store or the hospital, and you were not allowed to have people in your house. Police had the power to stop you on the road and enter your house! They probably didn’t do this much (NZ is a friendly place), but they still did arrest people a few times to get the message into the papers that they meant business.

They also announced an amazing economic safety net. The government said they would pay a large percentage of everyone’s salary (up to a cap), and the money was wired into people’s accounts within a few days.

It was a fantasy lockdown if you wanted firm government action, and it was a nightmare if you did not. But it got results. The serious lockdown was only 33 days – vs the US at over 300 days of ineffectiveness and counting.

NZ had done about the best in the world in beating the virus, and they began to reopen in stages. Soon, they were back to rock concerts and rugby games – and no masks!

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ESCAPE TO RUSSELL

Everyone has some crazy stories about going into lockdown. Here are the highlights of ours…

We and the Cowans followed our original itinerary and flew to the North Island as planned on March 22 (Day 206). We were going to visit geothermal hotspots and so much more, but most everything was closed already. We were only guests at our hotel. The government announced the 2 day countdown to total lockdown the next morning. We sprang into action!

We scrambled to find 2 rental houses near each other and that were available tomorrow and for 30 days minimum — and possible much longer. The good news is that NZ had almost no tourists left (they had partially closed the borders weeks ago), so we were able to find a good spot. But it was 7 hours by car from our current hotel!
We also had to cancel all our hotels and fun plans in NZ for the next 3 weeks. We were sorry to miss out on so much…
We bought a month’s worth of groceries. And games and toys and birthday presents. So much to do!
Unlike the USA, NZ had tons of toilet paper. But the country had run out of flour. We guess Kiwis love to bake! Luckily, we were able to finally buy some from our hotel restaurant, which was closing completely.
We packed ourselves, all our bags and a month’s worth of food and drove 7 hours to Russell, a remote sea town on the north end of the North island.

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RUSSELL, NZ

We arrived in Russell on Day 210. We had no idea how long we would be there. We ended up staying in our house for 70 days! It obviously became our longest stay on the trip by far…

Russell is a quaint 19th century town on the water, maybe a bit like Edgartown, MA. It looked nice, but we barely got there is the first 50 days due to the lockdown…

We did less in 70 days than we did in 7 days in Rwanda, but it was still good as far as lockdowns go. We were still with our friends the Cowans, who were troopers for doing their full vacation with us as planned in this crazy time! It was way more fun to lockdown with friends. Our lives got very small, but we still had a good time.

We did walks around the woods behind the house.

The house had a path to a rocky little beach, which was actually perfect in a time like this. No people! We climbed rocks, looked for shells, and explored tidal pools.

The kids played and swam a ton. This early in the lockdown, we were still all in pretty good spirits.

At night, we heard these insanely loud noises…. Was it a group of raccoons in a fight to the death? It turned out this was the mating call of the Kiwi ! Kiwi females, we learned, find this crazy screeching noise very romantic.

We decided to go out one night and see these Kiwis. They are the national symbol of NZ, and it turned out that Russell was one of the best places to try to see Kiwis. We got some red headlamps and headed out. But it turns out that, although it was super easy to hear them, it was really hard to actually see them. They are nocturnal and skittish, and we never found one, despite many nights of searching. Still, it was fun to have the adventure.

After a week in Russell, the Cowans managed to fly home on their originally scheduled flight – amazing when so many flights were being cancelled around the world. Thanks so much for coming in what turned out to be a crazy time. Certainly even more of an adventure than you planned for!

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HUBBARDS ARRIVE

Ashley’s parents had longstanding plans to come meet up with us in NZ, one of their favorite countries. Amazingly, despite the virus, they still ended up coming out to NZ and stayed with us for the remainder of our lockdown in NZ. And they brought Rud, Teresa and baby Kosara also! If the world is going to end, you might as well be together…

The Hubbard escape the virus story was even crazier than ours…

Cynthia and Ted planned to come to NZ by way to Austria, where they were going to stop to visit Ashley’s brother Rud, who was in a small ski town with his wife and 3-week-old baby. Rud and Teresa (who live in Amsterdam) thought if they had European style parental leave, they might as well go skiing with a newborn!

In mid March, more and more countries were starting to close their borders due to the virus spread. At that time, Italy was the world epicenter of the virus, and Austria is next door…. We talked about Ashley’s parents coming to NZ a bit early, but they weren’t sure. We also threw out the idea that Rud and Teresa and baby Kosara would be welcome, too. Then we started hearing that EU countries might seal off their borders from each other — a pretty crazy thought since one of the main points of the EU is to not have borders between the countries. It was a bit like if Massachusetts decided to close the border with Connecticut.

Ultimately, it seemed like everything was shutting down, so all 5 Hubbards left Austria by train, trying to make it to an international airport in Germany before the boarder closed. But late at night, the train stopped and they announced it would not cross the border to Germany! The Hubbards had to scramble and ultimately convinced a taxi to take them across the German border before it closed. Teresa’s German language skills saved the day! Then they needed to fly out before Germany closed its airports — and land before NZ closed its airports. They managed to take off, and then NZ announced they were closing their airport that night. But flights already en route were grandfathered in. Wow! It looked like they would make it.

The Hubbards got into NZ at the tail end of a strange little period where the NZ government had partially closed its boarders by requiring all new arrivals to do a strict 14 day quarantine. (The Cowans had arrived just before this rule came into effect.). This made almost all tourists cancel their plans, since no one wants a whole trip to be in quarantine, and most people come 2 weeks or less.

To be let in, you had to have a detailed plan about where you were going to quarantine, how you would get food delivered (could not leave your house at all – not even to the grocery store), etc. They said they would have healthcare workers check in on you to make sure you didn’t break the quarantine. If you didn’t like this plan, they said you would have to buy a ticket to immediately fly back home on the next flight — or be sent to a sort of COVID prison. Really! They are so friendly that they probably didn’t send lots of people to the prison, but there were some articles about backpackers who thought their hiking was remote enough to be like a quarantine — and then they had no choice but to pay for insanely expensive last minute flights home. As seemed to be their press strategy, that did just enough scary stuff to make sure everyone pays attention. And even returning NZ citizens needed to follow self quarantine plans like this!

Luckily, Teresa had a friend who had an empty house in NZ, so the 5 Hubbards went there to wait out the quarantine. They had the food delivery set up and everything.

When they finally got to us on April 1 (Day 216), everyone was so happy. Hazel was especially excited to see her baby cousin!

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FAMILY TIME

After the Hubbards arrived, our lockdown world continued to be really small.

With 10 people, there were a lot of mouths to feed, so it seemed like our whole life became about cooking… It was fun because Rud and Ted are great cooks! We learned lots of things, like how to make our own bagels.

One funny detail related to food is that we were told that we should not go to the local grocery store at all during the serious lockdown phase (even though it was ok in the official rules). The property manager was super helpful and friendly, and he suggested that he could periodically go shopping for us if we sent him a list. Later, it turned out that he was doing that to save us from being run out of town ! The people staying at the house right before us had were supposed to get married there. They and their wedding party had mostly flown in from Ireland. Local people felt like they weren’t being careful / wearing masks enough, and Europe was the center of the virus then. So all the wedding guests got run out of town and the couple had to get married just the 2 of them!

So we were pretty seriously at home a lot. We did some indoor exercise routines to pass the time, and even baby Kosara got into the fun…

We gave ourselves some “Corona-cuts.”

But the main excitement was getting to see little Kosara so much.

One day was super windy, and the kids decided to test if they could fly by running down a hill carrying an umbrella. It almost worked a few times!

We also did a lot of fort making, shoe bowling, lava lamp making, shell art, bug finding, and playing in the woods. But the biggest hit was still the nearby rocky beach. The kids had these special parts that they called Hueyville and Hazelville. Here is Huey in Hueyville.

And Hugh loved jumping in the waves!

We had Easter, Hugh’s 6th birthday, and Daddy’s 49th birthday.

The easter bunny was declared an Essential Worker by the NZ Prime Minister (really!).

And look who lost 2 teeth in lockdown!

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REOPENING A BIT

New Zealand reopened in phases. In the first phase, we could get takeout food and go for walks.

And kayak.

52 days after the lockdown began was the first day we could have dinner in a restaurant (which we still haven’t done since in the USA.). By this time, NZ had no new cases and no masks at all. It was great to get out of the house!

A few days later, we were able to explore the countryside and learn more about this fun place we had barely seen (despite being here for almost 2 months).

We went to a place where we learned about traditional Maori culture. Among many things, we learned about the “Haka,” an elaborate war dance Maori warriors performed to challenge and intimidate opponents. It was like a way of saying, “I am strong! Are you strong enough to fight me?!?” Some of the key expressions include Pukana (bulging eyes), Whetero (sticking out the tongue) and Waewae Takahai (stomping feet). It is an important Maori tradition, and the world famous New Zealand Rugby team performs it before every match even today.

The kids loved the Whetero!

We had a wonderful day sailing in the Bay of Islands. As usual, every day on a boat was a good day.

Our very last activity was probably our coolest: we visited a glow worm cave! This 20 million year old cave had teeny worms on the ceilings that glow naturally, a bit like fireflies. They are also one of the few animals besides spiders that secrete a sticky substance that they use to catch prey. They use their glowing abdomens to attract insects who get caught in the slime. This type of glow worm is only found in NZ and Australia.

Even with a few fun times, being mostly cooped up halfway around the world was not always perfect. So, we started planning how to get back home…