Hustles of International travel during Covid-19

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It’s been more than a year since the entire world is suffering from a virus which is popularly known as Covid-19. The Virus was first found in the city of Wuhan, which is situated in the country China. Since that day it has spread widely all around the world and many people have lost their loved ones as well. In this blog, I am going to talk about my first experience of travelling abroad. Hope you will like it!

                   

  

India confirmed its first Covid-19 case on 27th January, 2020 in Kerala and currently there are over 2.3 crores cases here and over 16 crores cases globally. During the month of February and March of 2020 the cases were few and the government started taking prompt actions for the safety of the public. I had to go to Vietnam on 13th March, 2020 due to some reasons and my date of arriving back to India was 22nd March, 2020. The moment I landed there, the government of Vietnam announced Lockdown, but restaurants, few local markets and travelling across the country were still open. Therefore, I couldn’t explore as much due to the restrictions. I went to three cities which were "Ho Chi Minh City, Huế and Hanoi". I used to explore places mostly in the evening because the temperature was high during the day. So after spending a couple of days there, I got an email from the airline company that my flight has been delayed to 23rd March.


        

Everything was going smoothly until I received news from India on 18th March, 2020. The Prime Minister announced a lockdown on 22nd of March and he also mentioned that all international travels will be restricted till a further time. I got furious and tried to book a ticket before 22nd March. Luckily, I got a ticket for the 21st of March and then I was a bit relieved. I was staying in Ho Chi Minh City and my flight was from Hanoi, which is the Capital of Vietnam. So I had to take a flight for Hanoi from Ho Chi Minh City to reach there. Then after all this I went to “Hue” for a couple of days to spend some time at the beach. I stayed there in a resort which was at the beach. There were very few people because of the restrictions, I spent some time there and made new friends as well. Then I came back to Ho chi minh and did my packing because I had to take my first flight the next day in the morning. So I woke up early in the morning and went directly to the airport and had my breakfast there. For the first time ever I was scared at the airport as there were very few people around and  also I was alone in a different country.

         


After all the verifications, I finally sat in the plane. It was a 5 hours long flight, hence I slept for a while. My flight landed around 10:00 p.m. and I didn't see anyone at the airport for some initial minutes, not even a staff member was around, all the washrooms were closed as well. Then I went through the first stage of immigration which took about half an hour. There I saw some people from other flights. I filled the form and completed the verification, then moved forward for the second round. I saw almost 10,000 people around me standing in different lines to get the stamp on their passports. This took around 2 hours and post that there were a few more stages. The last stage was the longest as it took more than 3 hours. Since there were lakhs of people at the airport, most of the students and professionals came back because of the lockdown. 

                                   
       


It was not easy to manage so many people at the airport, therefore the airport staff members made a group of 10 people each, so that it will be easy for them to identify which group has cleared which stages. There was so much crowd around that not even air could pass through us. For a moment I thought I would have been infected from Covid as of now because no one was following the protocol of social distancing. Everyone wanted to go out of the airport as soon as possible. All the shops were closed, therefore no one had nothing to eat but later on the Central Government arranged some snacks and water bottles for everyone.


After clearing the last stage which was the medical test, I finally came out of the airport exactly at 6 in the morning. I removed my Mask for a second, took a deep breath and booked a cab to go back home. Overall my first international trip was quite a roller coaster but I was lucky enough to clear the immigration in 8 hours. I talked to people inside the airport and some of them told me they were waiting to go outside of the airport since the morning. Also, there were some people who were stuck because their connecting flight got cancelled or delayed. After coming back I quarantined for 14 days and fortunately had no symptoms of Covid-19. 


Please do tell me if you liked this blog. Suggestions are always welcome. :)


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