Covid-19 Archives - 4corners7seas

Covid-19: Light at the End of the Tunnel

I was in Taiwan when the covid-19 pandemic started, which was pretty much the best place to be. The government there didn’t wait for Chinese authorities or the WHO to confirm human-to-human transmission, and immediately started screening inbound passengers from China and asked everyone to wear masks, practise good hygiene, and avoid crowds where possible.

They’ve basically been ready for the next one since SARS in 2003, and the vice president being an epidemiologist probably helped. It was hard to get masks and sanitiser for a month or so, when this pic was taken:

…but they quickly ramped up production and introduced a rationing system to make sure people had enough.

It was also one of the fastest countries to apply border controls, and has generally done an excellent job so far of controlling the virus – it was mind-boggling watching from a distance as places like the UK and US so badly screwed up their own responses.

I was hoping to ride the pandemic out in Taipei, and I was initially allowed to overstay for 10 weeks beyond the end of my tourist stamp (see my post here for a bit more on life in Taipei during the pandemic). Unfortunately that wasn’t extended and I had no way to stay longer, so I had to either go back to the UK or go to the one other place near Taiwan that would let me in, which was Korea.

Korea’s initial response wasn’t as fast and effective as Taiwan’s, and it suffered the first major outbreak outside China – however, after the bad start they got their shit together and even managed to be the only major economy to keep their border open to short-term visitors without also letting a ton of imported cases in and losing control of the virus. This was achieved by setting up an extremely strict quarantine system for everyone arriving in Korea – either at home for citizens and residents, or in government-managed facilities for temporary visitors (at visitors’ own expense). See here for a detailed account of quarantine in Korea and here for the rest of my stay in Seoul.

But after 14 days of quarantine and 76 days of relatively normal life in Seoul, I had to move on again. It still wasn’t possible to enter Taiwan, so back to England it was.

Here’s a photo I posted on Instagram and an excerpt from the little rant that went with it about arriving back in the UK:

…being out of options I came back to England. Absolute joke. Walked right through the airport without speaking to a human being. Coming from Korea I didn’t have to self-isolate as it’s on the safe list, but nobody checked where I’d come in from anyway, or where I was going, or how I was getting there, or even what my temperature was (never mind an actual covid test)

In Korea I’d experienced a month of semi-lockdown in Seoul, which was triggered by a spike to 300 cases per day. It worked, and a month later they were back down to double figures.

By contrast the UK was up to over 20000 cases per day before Boris Johnson realised he’d better finally do something that his science advisors told him to do many weeks earlier (but which he seems to have resisted because it wouldn’t be good for his popularity). So now we have this lockdown, and even once it ends most of the country will probably have tier 2/3 semi-lockdown conditions through the winter.

Care workers are busting their asses and the rest of us are asked to curb our lives in lockdown – we’re all doing our bit, but the government is totally failing to do theirs. Useless…

And that was before the new variant made everything even worse, which happened right after the government ended the lockdown far too early and against the advice of scientists (yet again), leading to yet another, stricter, longer lockdown which still continues as I write this.

At this point in the UK it’s already too late to stop the virus, so it’s basically just a case of waiting for the vaccine to be given to enough people for things to start getting back to normal. To be fair the vaccine rollout is the one thing that seems to have been done well by the UK in this pandemic and is progressing at pace, so hopefully things in the UK will be normal or at least normal-ish later this year. And that goes for everywhere else with an adequate vaccine supply – but there are many countries (still the majority globally) which don’t have that, so a lot of people around the world are unlikely to get it this year and a lot of countries around the world will still be messed up while others are getting back to normality.

I’m guessing this all means that borders will start slowly opening again soon, but most countries will probably only let you in with proof of vaccination.

The whole thing also has me wondering about the whole “digital nomad” thing. It sounds great, being able to travel around staying for a month here, two months there, chasing the sun or the snow or ticking off travel ambitions all while you work from your laptop; but then what happens when the shit hits the fan, countries close their borders, and most travel shuts down? You probably end up having to go back to the country you’re actually a citizen of – most others won’t let you in, and even if you can go somewhere (like I could to Korea for a few months) your income might be decimated. Mine certainly was, and any other travel blog you read will probably say the same thing.

For example, the traffic over on my Korea snowboard website this ski season was 90% down, and the income from it was 98% down. Meanwhile here on this website I’d put a ton of work into a Tokyo guide for foreign visitors heading to Japan for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, which obviously didn’t happen in 2020 and now look set to go ahead in 2021 but without any foreign fans. So that project ended up being a lot of time down the drain, and thousands of dollars of lost income.

Which is to say, job security isn’t great for digital nomad travel blogging – that obviously goes with the territory, but for many the pandemic saw that go from being a potential problem to a very real and immediate one.

Furthermore, despite this romantic notion of being a ‘citizen of the world’, of nowhere and everywhere, once again we see that your passport really does make a difference. This winter under lockdown in the UK hasn’t been a lot of fun. But (despite the idiot politicians in charge) at least I could come back to a country with a great health system that would treat me (without billing me) if I did get sick, which has developed vaccines and is rolling them out quickly, and where daily life for most of the population has remained safe & comfortable enough (although dull & frustrating). Again we see that the accident of birth on one or other side of a border can make a huge difference.

So was it all bullshit, being a digital nomad – or on the other hand, in the long run might the pandemic be seen as having accelerated the trend? One thing that always sucks about it as a long-term lifestyle is visas – take Thailand for example, which for years now has been host to a revolving population of digital nomads, some staying for a few months at a time, but others staying for years with visa runs every couple of months as necessary. It always seemed to me that Thailand (and others) would be smart to introduce some sort of long-stay visa for remote workers, allowing people to legally stay for say a year while working online, charging a visa fee in lieu of income tax.

Well, a whole bunch of countries have now started schemes along these lines, with more likely to follow: Antigua & Barbuda, Bahamas, Anguilla, Barbados, Bermuda, Caymans, Mauritius, Costa Rica, UAE, Iceland, Estonia, Croatia, and Georgia all now have some sort of remote work visa system for long stays. Although it is also worth noting that they’re mostly only available to those with income above a certain level, which is usually way more than I’ve ever earned online (50 grand in some cases) and I’m pretty confident is way more than most of those digital nomads in Thailand (and elsewhere in SE Asia, Central America and so on) have ever earned. But it’s a start, and it’ll be interesting to see if it becomes an established thing.

Even for many people who either can’t or don’t have any desire to be digital nomads, the pandemic has been a first experience of working remotely. Most of my friends in the UK, for example, have been doing their regular jobs from home during the various lockdowns – some like it, some don’t, but either way it’s definitely been a demonstration of the possibilities provided by modern tech for doing remotely what used to require everyone to commute for. In the future we may well also look back on the pandemic as being a key event in changing work cultures, perhaps with it becoming the norm for people to do a combination of office work days and remote work days.

This post is starting to ramble beyond the scope of a travel blog, but it’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out once the pandemic is finally under control globally. It did expose the insecurity of being a digital nomad, but it has also shown the viability of widespread remote work becoming a new norm.

A few months in Seoul during covid-19

Covid-19, Korea

When the covid-19 pandemic started, I was in Taiwan which was pretty much the best place to be. The government there didn’t wait for China or the WHO to confirm human-to-human transmission, and immediately started screening inbound passengers from China and asked everyone to wear masks, practise good hygiene, and avoid crowds where possible. It was also one of the fastest to apply border controls, and has generally done an excellent job so far of controlling the virus – it was mind-boggling watching places like the UK and US so badly screwing up their own responses.

I was hoping to ride the pandemic out in Taipei, and I was initially allowed to overstay for 10 weeks beyond the end of my tourist stamp (see here about life in Taipei during the pandemic). Unfortunately that wasn’t extended and I had no way to stay longer, so I had to either go back to the UK or go to the one other place near Taiwan that would let me in, which was Korea.

Korea’s response hadn’t been quite as fast and effective as Taiwan’s, and it suffered the first major outbreak outside China – however, after the bad start they got their shit together and even managed to be the only major economy to keep their border open without also letting a ton of imported cases in and losing control of the virus. This was achieved by setting up an extremely strict quarantine system for everyone arriving in Korea – either at home for citizens and residents, or in government-managed facilities for temporary visitors (at visitors’ own expense). This was my quarantine room in Incheon:

Korea did bar entry to many nationalities as a reciprocal response, as those countries had first barred entry to Koreans during the early months of the pandemic. This didn’t apply to Brits though so I was able to go there, and as the UK government was clearly not doing a good job Korea seemed like the best option – except I could only stay 90 days total and would have to spend the first 14 doing an expensive quarantine stint. The hope was that by the end of 90 days, Taiwan might have set up some similar system by which I’d be able to go back there and avoid the UK.

That turned out not to be the case, so once my 90 days in Korea were up I did end up coming back to England, where I’m writing this now and where I guess I’m stuck until things start getting somewhat back to normal in the hopefully not-too-distant future. So the Korea plan turned out to be a waste of money really, but it was worth a try and (quarantine aside) Seoul was still a good place to spend a few months catching up with friends, eating & drinking, and doing some hiking.

You can read my detailed account of the quarantine experience here, and the rest of this post is just to share a bit of what I did after that.

Honestly, that first day after quarantine it just felt amazing to be outdoors breathing air that hadn’t come through ducts, even though the weather was shit. Actually the weather was awful for weeks, raining cats & dogs a lot of the time and leading to severe flooding in parts of the city – if you’ve seen Parasite you’ll recall a key scene in the film where torrential rain leads to their apartment flooding, and that does sometimes happen in rainy season.

Dude having a smoke and a drink during a downpour at the convenience store opposite my airbnb:

Was much better once rainy season ended:

And life continued largely as normal in most of the city, albeit with everyone wearing masks everywhere and things definitely being a bit quieter than usual. This was especially obvious in tourists areas like Myeongdong which was an absolute ghost town compared to usual, and also the normally heaving nightlife was subdued as clubs had been closed following mini-outbreaks and a lot of people were avoiding bars. Itaewon in particular was badly affected (I’m guessing a bunch of bars & clubs there won’t survive the pandemic), and Gangnam & Hongdae were pretty quiet too.

This was at the top of Namsan, where there’d normally be a sea of tourists jostling for elbow room:

Great views as usual though:

After that hike up Namsan I realised I’d made the comedy error of forgetting both to top up my subway pass or to bring any other cash or card with me, so then spent an hour and a half walking back to my airbnb on the other side of the river and up & down over a couple more small mountains. Which I didn’t mind at all, as it’s always interesting to walk through residential areas of a city you might normally never see, and it was a nice evening too. Snapped this (of the skyscrapers on Yeouido island) from the bridge over the Han:

This spell in Seoul was also a good opportunity to update and add to my Seoul hiking pages, including my favourite route up Gwanaksan again:

These weird Star Trek trees have sprouted outside Sadang Station (near Gwanaksan) since my last visit:

I also did several hikes on the ridge along the southern edge of Bukhansan National Park to check the best trails and put together this hiking route. Great terrain and views up there:

Couple of random neighbourhood shots displaying leisure time priorities in Korea:

I’ve written plenty on this blog about all the great hiking in the mountains around the city, but another really neat thing about Seoul is there are lots of smaller hills here & there which have been left as islands of real forest within the concrete forest. If you live near one of them you can go and stretch your legs in natural surroundings without even having to take the metro anywhere, and some of these parks are connected together by bridges so you can string them together for a longer walk. I went for a wander from Express Bus Terminal Station down to Naebang through a couple of these parks, connected by this pedestrian bridge over a major road:

While these mini forests are no substitute for the real thing, they’re a pretty cool feature to have right there in the middle of such a high density urban environment.

It wasn’t all plain sailing in Seoul while I was there – almost half of my time in the city coincided with a 6-week partial lockdown, with all the bars shut, most cafes shut, and a 9pm curfew for restaurants. This obviously wasn’t great, but everything else stayed open so it wasn’t awful either – but what was especially noteworthy was that they did this in response to having over 100 cases per day in Seoul, with the intention of getting it back down below that threshold, and it worked. Meanwhile the UK was spiking to thousands of cases a day due to everyone relaxing after the end of the first lockdown there, but the government was just dithering on, pretending the shit wasn’t massively hitting the fan again, and not responding until far too late (again). It was infuriating being in a country taking pro-active and effective measures while watching the UK blundering into a disaster, and that was the situation in which I found myself heading back to England.

The contrast between the arrival at Seoul-Incheon Airport and the arrival at London Heathrow was staggering, and it was immediately obvious to me why Korea was doing a pretty good containment job and the UK had totally failed to. But that’s a rant for another post…

Coronavirus Quarantine in Korea

Covid-19, Korea

I was woken up by the sound of a disembodied female voice speaking in heavily Korean-accented but clear English:

”This is an announcement of government support team. Your meal will be served shortly. Please do not open your door except at the allotted time”

I’d only been asleep for a few hours, had fallen asleep in my clothes with the light on in an unfamiliar hotel room, and was woken from the middle of a dream. Needless to say it took me a while to work out what the hell was going on, as the same message continued playing in a stream of a dozen different languages before repeating again. It went on for a good 5 minutes, by which time I’d realised it was being piped through a speaker in the ceiling near the door.

Such pre-recorded messages were piped in through that speaker in multiple languages in a fixed daily pattern, mostly just before and after the three daily meal times to provide general information about waste disposal and so on.

The most dystopian went like this:

“This is an announcement of government support team. In this temporary living facility, cases have been reported continuously. Do not come out of your room to prevent the transmission of covid-19. Especially be careful not to close the door when you get your meal and leave your garbage bag in front of your door”

Another warned that leaving the room would result in immediate arrest and deportation.

This was the room I’d checked into late the evening before:

My coronavirus quarantine room at Incheon airport

…and the view I woke up to that morning:

The view from my coronavirus quarantine room at Incheon airport

To be fair, if you’re going to be stuck in one room for 14 days that’s a decent room to be stuck in, and it wasn’t a bad view to be stuck with either. The large building with the angular roof is a casino (illegal for locals to gamble in, hence it being right next to the airport). Those in rooms on the other side of the hotel had views out over Incheon International Airport, probably not as nice but they said it was cool watching the planes coming and going (although far fewer than usual of course).

And this was the breakfast I found when I investigated outside my door after the announcement finished on that first morning:

A meal served during my covid-19 quarantine in Korea

Nothing fancy, but a decent enough breakfast. The meals were served thus:

Covid-19 biohazard waste disposal and food delivery bags

The orange biohazard bag outside my neighbour’s door across the hall is how you throw out your trash while in quarantine. Upon arrival you’re given a stash, one per day:

So life in quarantine followed a highly regimented pattern. Breakfast at 8am, lunch at midday, dinner at 6pm, with the piped messages before and after each meal. You drop the trash out when taking your meal in, and apart from meals you’re forbidden to open the door except when the staff knock. They do a scheduled round after the evening meal, starting from 7pm, to take everyone’s temperature and verbally check you’re okay and ask if you have any symptoms. These aren’t hotel staff, but medical professionals in full hazmat gear. All very polite and friendly, but still it feels very much like you’re in some dystopian sci-fi movie. I suppose in many ways 2020 basically is a dystopian sci-fi movie.

The most surreal part was arrival at the airport. Coming into the immigration hall you first hand in your coronavirus form at a desk, based on which you get sent to different procedure lines e.g. foreigners with residency get to do quarantine at home, so are processed differently. But if like me you’re entering on a tourist stamp, you get sent to the government quarantine line. They take a local contact number & address, and he checked the number on the spot so make sure you have a friend ready to take a call at your approximate arrival time. Then you have to download the quarantine self-assessment app on your phone or tablet to report your symptom status every day while in quarantine.

The app for home quarantine is different and actually monitors that you don’t leave your house, also requiring you to check in at regular intervals so you can’t just leave your phone at home and go off for a weekend somewhere – I was actually given the wrong app initially, so my friend got a confused call from the local government office the next day and had to explain I was in government quarantine and not staying with her.

After that there was another desk to provide some more details, and then finally the passport control line. When they stamp you in they give you a lanyard to wear, which signals the staff on the other side that you’re going to quarantine. They grab you when you come through and take you to fenced off waiting areas for quarantinees to wait for buses (all very well distanced), and a short time later we boarded our bus which then sat there for well over an hour (presumably to wait for another load of passengers, but in the end no more joined us). It was quite late and we were initially told we’d be going to a hotel near the Everland theme park way over on the southeast side of the greater Seoul conurbation (Incheon Airport is on an island on the west side of it all), but after that long wait they ended up just driving us to the Grand Hyatt near the airport. And that was a good stroke of luck – the price you pay is fixed at 100 USD per night regardless of the hotel, so the Hyatt is a score (it would actually cost more than that just to book it for a regular stay in normal circumstances). The Everland hotel looked ok too though to be fair.

Once at the hotel you line up again to get tested, and again to pay and be checked in. I think the extra staff at the airport were all military, while the staff at the hotel were from the CDC (Center for Disease Control)

The test wasn’t exactly painful, but it’s pretty unpleasant – the swab goes in through your nose and scrapes the very top of the back of your throat. You’ve probably never had anything do that before, and it feels totally gross. But it was okay, and the result is delivered to your room the following evening.

If positive, you get hospitalised (which you don’t have to pay for) until your case is resolved. If negative, you get to stay in your deluxe prison cell for another 13 days.

If you develop a fever or other symptoms during your stay, you get another covid test and if positive you get hospitalised. Thankfully I didn’t have to have a second test – the one on arrival was more than enough!

The whole arrival process is quite time consuming, but very well organised and it’s actually really impressive that Korea set all that up in order to keep its borders open without importing uncontrollable numbers of covid cases. Most countries have either closed their borders to foreigners, or have just totally lost control of the virus situation (no coincidence). It was a relief to finally get to the room, but it wasn’t horrendous or anything – although I have to say, if you do it after a 12-hour red-eye from a completely different time zone it will be a seriously trippy experience.

Anyway once you’re in and the novelty & confusion of the first day are behind you, you have a lot of time to fill in between meals. You have a TV and wifi, one guy said he spent the entire time bingeing Netflix (probably a common strategy), another said he was working on a book so used it as writing time. Personally I treated it as a 14-day harmonica woodshed, I probably averaged 3 or 4 hours of harmonica practice per day. Hopefully my neighbours didn’t hate it…

Looking across at the other wing of the hotel (built at a slight angle, so you could see into a small portion of the rooms near the windows) I saw one room with a family in it and two young kids literally bouncing off the walls, lots of people sitting in the window playing on their phones, and most bizarrely one guy who kept standing in his window butt-naked which was an unwelcome surprise on several occasions.

And that’s life in quarantine. The strict regime makes it feel like a luxury prison, and insects landing on the window was as exciting as it got, but as long as you take something with you to pass the time (or are happy just bingeing the internet) it isn’t all that bad – especially if you get lucky with your hotel like I did.

Insect visitors:

On the last day you get escorted out early in the morning (7am in our case, so you’re out of the way before breakfast) and loaded onto shuttle buses to a nearby metro station, and then you’re finally free.

If you’re wondering about the food, no it isn’t fantastic. But it’s not too bad on the whole, each meal bag has a tray with a main dish and a few sides, plus an assortment of fresh fruit, canned drinks, water, and snacks like chocolate bars, cereal, or instant soup or noodles. You have a kettle in the room so you can make those later, and make tea & coffee.

On that note, a warning to fellow caffeine addicts: take a coffee supply in with you. They did provide a few sachets of coffee in the room, and canned coffee was sometimes provided with breakfast (not every day though), but I was very glad I took some with me. At one point I was rationing out what I had left to make sure I didn’t end up having to do caffeine cold turkey for the last few days, but the canned coffee supply was good for those days as it turned out which saved the day. Seriously, worrying about running out of coffee was the most stressful thing about quarantine! (actually, you could probably order a box in from Amazon – deliveries are allowed but not for fresh food)

Anyway, this was all they provided to start with so taking your own is a good idea:

Here are a few of the meals I was served:

I guess they get the meals in from a catering company then microwave them on site prior to serving. Sometimes the food was only lukewarm, sometimes piping hot – I was at the end room on the top floor so I think my meal was dropped off either first or last, hence the hit & miss temperature. There were a couple of main dishes I thought were pretty bad, but most of it was fine. The worst thing was the lack of variety, and after 14 days I was extremely bored of rice.

If you have veggie or religious dietary requirements you can specify this on arrival and they cater to your needs, though I doubt this extends as far as being able to ask for pescetarian or keto.

Here’s a few more window pics to finish up with, watching the tide roll in & out and dreaming of fresh air:

For some thoughts & pics of Seoul after I left quarantine see here

If you have any questions about the quarantine system in Korea give me a shout below and I’ll do my best to answer.

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Taiwan: life (almost) as normal during the pandemic

Covid-19, Taiwan

The above photo is Taipei from the Earth God Temple in Nanshijiao, but I’m writing this post in Korea, where I recently did a 14-day stint in government quarantine in order to enter the country (after having to leave Taipei following the end of Taiwan’s coronavirus overstay amnesty at the end of June). More on all that soon (see here), but first here are some photos of life in Taipei recently – thanks to Taiwan’s early and effective response to the pandemic life has been mostly pretty normal other than the border being closed to tourists and people wearing masks everywhere (they’ve basically been ready for the next one since SARS in 2003, and the vice president being an epidemiologist probably helps)

This was taken around Valentine’s Day, and perfectly sums up my feelings about that particular occasion:

And here’s Dom getting stuck into St Patrick’s festivities a month later:

A few obligatory Taipei 101 snaps:

View of Taipei 101 from Yuanshan Station

View of Taipei 101 and a small temple in the park

This last one’s from Fuzhoushan, hike report here

A few random murals spotted around town:

No, sorry I don’t know why the dolphin has a toothbrush or why there’s a giant crab on the side of that building. Pretty cool though.

Weather was fantastic throughout winter and spring, beautiful blue skies but not too hot:

Afternoon rays at Baoan Temple:

These flightless birds are a common sight in Taipei’s city parks and on the hiking trails in the surrounding mountains:

An awesome tree in a parking lot. Glad it’s been left there through the years:

Xingtian Temple, with covid station (temperature check & sanitiser) at the entrance:

This next one was taken in January or February, when the whole world should have already been taking precautionary steps for the likely arrival of coronavirus but most countries failed to do so. Taiwan acted early and it paid off. It was hard to get masks and sanitiser for a month or so (i.e. when this pic was taken), but they quickly ramped up production and introduced a rationing system to make sure people had enough:

A few random comical touches (the first one always makes me think of My My, Hey Hey from Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps, and no I didn’t arrange the animals in the last one):

And this lego cat’s a spitting image of the kitten my friends adopted last year:

…though he’s not a kitten any more:

And finally a couple more hikes I did recently were Qixingshan again (but in better weather, route info here):

…and walking up to the Hongludi Earth God Temple in southern New Taipei, with its massive statue of the god in question and a whole bunch of random statues on the road up. I didn’t find the best route up, but did find a good one coming back down through the forest along the ridge. So I haven’t written this one up as a hike yet, but plan to go back at some point and find a better route to write up:

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See more Taiwan posts here, Taiwan travel guide here, Taipei hiking guide here