“Oh, and ten days in quarantine.”
I merely nodded when my dad told me about that. I was much too worried about the golf tournaments overseas that I was to participate in to even begin to consider the mandatory travel quarantine for COVID-19 in a hotel. As a matter of fact, I remember thinking that it would be a good break after a harrowing two weeks spent in intense competitions. It’s going to be great, I thought.
Of course, the universe loves a little irony.
This is NOT great; I thought ten minutes after entering our hotel room. We had arrived in Manila in the latter part of the afternoon after a long twenty-hour journey. The entire journey was eerily lonely; the airports were deserted, and the hotel almost felt sick, as if the silence had crushed its very spirit.
These perturbed me only a little bit; after all, this was something I’d grown rather accustomed to since the start of the lockdowns. However, when the sun began to set, a strange feeling began descending on me, and I paced around the room with an odd unease. Something terrible had seized me, and suddenly, everything felt wrong.
I shivered. I wished that, like in the pre-pandemic years, I could just go home.
In the middle of a global pandemic, travel is a tricky thing. It’s needed for both business and leisure, but is it worth another case, another death, another outbreak that needs to be quelled? The solution to this dilemma—at least, in the Philippines—is simple: quarantine.
The guidelines around that time—late July 2021—required us to stay quarantined in a hotel for ten days since we came from a yellow-listed country, and I was not fully vaccinated. Cheery.
-
The first night—I admit—I was terrified. I’m usually perfectly happy to be on my own for a few days, but this was different. I hated knowing that I couldn’t exit the hotel room. Unlike community quarantines, I was far away from the comfort of my own home; everything here was foreign, tainted with some cold darkness.
Thankfully, as the days passed, it got better. I was able to watch some TV, cram-read Macbeth, and call my friends. On days when it wasn’t raining, I would often go out to the balcony, staring at the view. I loved the gusts of wind and the busy buildings and roads. It almost made life feel ordinary, like I was there on vacation. But then, I would see the deserted courtyards and the lifeless swimming pool; I would remember how this hotel, once filled to the brim with excited guests, was now silent: the entrance to the dining hall covered, the spa turned into a receiving area for travelers about to be quarantined, the halls gaunt and sorrowful, as if they mourned the people that once coursed through them.
After a few relatively pleasant days, it was the seventh day of our quarantine. That afternoon, we had our RT-PCR test. We were escorted by one of the hotel staff to a lounge that was converted into a testing room. I was rather nervous, not just about the pain of the test itself but also because this would determine whether we got to go home in a few days or stay quarantined for even longer.
We endured the test, but it left us with watering eyes and stinging sensations in our noses. Then we returned to the hotel room, which was just beginning to darken as the sun started to descend the pale sky towards the horizon.
-
In the afternoon of the ninth day, we celebrated: we had tested negative for COVID-19. We would go home the next day. I had somewhat adjusted to the quarantine—maybe even learned to enjoy it—but the prospect of leaving was beautiful.
On the tenth day, around an hour after lunch, we were ready to depart. We dragged our luggage through the carpeted corridors, down to the ground floor. As soon as our Grab arrived, we left. I was incredibly glad that I was leaving, but I still felt on edge, especially when I saw all the Covid reminders and guidelines taped to the chairs in the car.
Not long after, we were back on the traffic-clogged roads, alongside exasperated drivers, weaving through rows of jeepneys and tricycles. It wasn’t quite the same as it was before 2020—and perhaps, it never would be. This hung heavily on my mind, but I tried to tell myself that all that mattered now was that we were making our way down familiar roads, past familiar buildings, back home.
Comments