Livin' La Vida Lockdown Day 22: Travel Plans

Travel plans for the foreseeable future? From the window to the wall and a trip down the hall...scratch that - I live in an apartment so window and wall it is.

For a person that travels a fair bit (OK a lot) and spends large amounts of time in airports, on the move or bouncing from one place to the next - this has been the hardest thing to come to terms with by far. Staying the hell still. And this is being still on steroids.

Not looking at Skyscanner, hotel booking platforms and the myriad of other ways I plan our life - has been really weird. Not working out the where to next - what are we going to eat - who do we know there and how do we fit life around the work part? It's been a bit of an adjustment.

That feeling that every place is the next place to see - that feeling is gone now. My luggage sits gathering dust - the routine of our life and work is in tatters. Even 'The Bagus Bus' sits in storage and will be there for the foreseeable future.

The world closes up very differently when you have lived fairly nomadically and not been stuck in one place for years on end. The world becomes very bloody small all of a sudden. Your options are no longer unlimited and it feels static. So if you cant go out - you go in. You start reminding yourself why you chose this path years ago and all the wonder it has brought you and will bring you in the future. Just not yet.

I saw this COVID train heading for us months ago and would often say - it is going to boil down to where you can bunker and ride this shitstorm out. Just make sure it has got OK health care where you are. Don't be somewhere like Bali or regional Thailand where they will need the resources for the locals - don't be a burden on a developing region. Be prepared, humble and humane. If you can go home - go home ( whatever home looks like). And we were - we were headed to WA to get in our bus and escape all this for a few months before coming back home to Asia again. Then life made a sudden 360 and here we are. One in Oz - one in Penang and life telling you this is where you are obviously meant to be - for now.

The dust is slowly settling after watching my friends scatter - shell shocked - some returned home (that looks different for everyone - its a mixed bag) - some packed up in a hurry and just went to the closest city with a decent hospital - others just hoped for the best that the decision they were making wasn't going to be forever. There were a lot of tears, feelings of anxiety, fear, uncertainty and dread. And one by one they all found a safe haven to ride this storm out. And so did I.

But what I do know is no one walked away from their life easily - it was sad, frightening and many of us are stuck in places we didn't expect and just treading water until. Because no one knows how this will all pan out. No one knows who will open borders first - if we can ever resume our old life at all. I doubt that kind of liberty will be there again. I doubt I will feel the freedom of knowing I can jump on a plane and be in another country in the same day - for a long, long time.

So I suppose this lockdown is good practice for sitting the hell still. I have surrendered to it - but I know the moment I hear airports are opening up again for real - I am going to be one happy camper. A lot of us are.