Australia to Germany and back
After nearly two agonising years of not seeing my family and friends back in Germany due to COVID, I finally boarded a flight back to the homeland late August of this year. Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve only been on a plane once, when I went to Sydney for work in May of this year. Even more than then, the flight to Germany was a surreal experience because there weren’t more than 20 people in the entire plane. This is due to the caps on travellers that wish to enter Australia.
I can’t believe that my last blog post dates back to April of this year. It wasn’t even due to nothing happening; we actually did a couple of great trips that I’m still planning to feature in the next few weeks, just in time for the Australian summer. My lack of blogging was more related to the effects that the pandemic and its consequences (i.e. not being able to seeing my family and working from home) had on my wellbeing and mental health. Work and life just got too busy, so something had to give – and that was unfortunately my blog.
To start off with, I’m conscious that some readers of this blog might not know much about the situation we’ve been in in Australia since March 2020. The reason why I couldn’t go home was because borders have been closed. When I say closed, it means that people on temporary visas (like me) have been able to leave Australia but they haven’t been allowed back in. People on permanent residency or citizens on the contrary haven’t been allowed to leave, but those that have already found themselves out of the country have been able to come back in. Exemptions from this regulation were being granted on rare occasions, e.g. compassionate grounds, when a family member was gravely ill etc.
On a side note: This is all supposed to change from November / December for some states e.g. New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland. Western Australia will wait until they’ve reached 80-90% vaccination rate before they announce their plans to reopen.
In April of this year, I fortunately got granted another visa as a temporary resident. This meant that I could still leave as a temporary visa holder, however the difference being that now, because of my partner, I was able to come back without exemption. As soon as I had verified this information with a couple of migration agents, the Australian government announced a further reduction by 50% of the number of incoming travellers per week that were allowed into the country. I was sure that flight prices would increase tremendously as a reaction to this announcement, so I booked a flight right away, which probably saved me a substantial amount of money.
Flying back and forth between Europe and Australia has always been a little stressful for me, just because it’s a long flight. But now I needed a PCR test before flying, be fully vaccinated, at the airport they took my temperature. In consequence, I only really believed that I was actually going when I sat in the plane.
Perth airport right now is merely a ghost town – even more so because Western Australia has also closed off its borders to other states in order to keep the virus out, in line with the “zero cases” policy they’ve been following throughout the pandemic. Most shops are closed, and gates are quiet and empty. The same goes for the planes – on the way out as well as in, no more than 20 passengers travelled in any one plane. Currently the caps are 35 people per flight maximum. When I tried to extend my stay and change the return flight to a later date, I was told that there are no more flights to Perth until March / April 2022.
This means that, after a wonderful six weeks back home, I’m now back in Perth and in hotel quarantine, which is mandatory for returning travellers (with or without vaccination). More about my time in Germany and the hotel quarantine fun in my next posts. 😊
