Why Kiwis are leaving the nest
It’s in Kiwis’ blood, and some just can’t resist the urge to travel. Bess Manson reports.
Janaya Wilkins’ dad wasn’t on board. Her friends thought she was mad. Return to the UK, amid the havoc Covid-19 is wreaking on its citizens? Why would you?
But despite the grim death toll and rising infection rate, returning to London was a nobrainer. Life has to carry on, and her life is in London.
What had started out as a twoweek visit home to Wellington in mid-March turned into a threemonth stay for Wilkins and her husband Sasha as New Zealand locked down against the virus.
Their flights back to the UK, where Wilkins, 34, runs sustainable swimwear company SloActive, were cancelled as borders around the world clamped shut.
The silver lining was a pretty special lockdown with family.
‘‘It was stolen time that many of us might not have with our families under normal circumstances,’’ she says.
‘‘I will always look back fondly on that time and am so proud to call myself a New Zealander in the way we all came together to unite against Covid.’’
Nostalgia has to give way to practicality, though, and when the country dropped to level 2, they booked their flights to the UK.
She understands the New Zealand public’s anxiety around the virus, since we as a nation have done a great job to all but stamp it out. But the rest of the world is having to carry on with the virus still circulating, she says.
‘‘I think that is going to be the new global normal – I can’t see it going away any time soon.
‘‘Of course we were concerned about leaving New Zealand, where we had managed to basically get back to ‘normal’, and head to the UK where the numbers were still so high. But we also needed to get back to our businesses and flat.’’
Their journey began on June 5 and it was a harsh re-entry into a changed world.
There was no social distancing on their Air New Zealand flight, Wilkins says, and no mandatory wearing of masks. The touch-screen and face-to face security screening in Los Angeles, where they transited, made it almost impossible not to be exposed to germs.
They didn’t speak to anyone at customs upon arrival in London, and used e-gates to pass through border control.
‘‘Heathrow Airport was the quietest I have ever seen it – like a desert.’’
They arrived a few days before mandatory selfquarantine in the UK, but they self-isolated at their flat in north London as a precaution.
With the European borders now open, Wilkins and her husband are planning to quit London for the summer and head to southwest France, where they will continue working remotely – something they found difficult at opposite ends of the day in New Zealand.
‘‘It’s hard to be in a lockeddown city like London, and we saw this as an opportunity to be by the sea and away from the city, but still available for work on the same time zone for managing work remotely.
‘’We plan to do the same things we are doing in London: stay home and work remotely, but instead of going running along a busy street for exercise, we will be in a forest or going surfing.’’
A return to New Zealand soon is not on the cards, though who knows with the ever-shifting sands of the virus. But Wilkins expects to have to pay for quarantine when she does come back.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has warned that those planning to leave the country for ‘‘non-essential’’ reasons during the Covid-19 pandemic might be left picking up their isolation or quarantine bill on return.
‘‘The cost of a flight to New Zealand, along with the quarantine cost at the end of it, will likely squeeze out a large portion of Kiwis looking to return home for work or family,’’ Wilkins says. ‘‘In saying that, I don’t think it is right for the taxpayer to be fully funding personal choices.’’ For journalist Laura Walters and her teacher husband, Michael Lee, their OE was a long time coming.
They had talked for years about taking off on the classic OE to the UK but every year something got in the way – a new job, more study. ‘‘There was always something that held up our plans. This time we thought it’s now or never. Neither of us has ancestry, I was about to turn 31, which is the cutoff age for Youth Mobility Visas, and I had to be in the UK before my birthday in April.
‘‘The clock was ticking and we thought, if we are ever going to do this, then we’ve got to do it now.’’
Before their February 28 departure, there was enough writing on the wall to suggest the virus would have a hefty impact. If they had been planning just a short holiday, they would not have come to the UK, she says. If they could have extended their visas, they would have delayed their trip.
‘‘But we thought, what’s the difference with going into lockdown in New Zealand and lockdown in the UK? Of course, now we know they were very different scenarios.
‘‘But at that stage we thought, we’re young and healthy, we’ll be fine, rather than thinking more about how it was so easily spread. We could have been spreading it on the plane from Singapore to the UK, spreading it on the Tube. We could have been part of the problem, but we just didn’t think about that then.’’
There were fleeting moments when they questioned their decision to travel, particularly when they saw the panic buying and the infection numbers rising in the UK.
‘‘[But] we’re both pretty relaxed people. We don’t scare too easily.
‘’With Covid, early on, we thought it would be an issue [but] we’ll just be careful, we’ll be fine. We didn’t think it would make a huge difference to our plans.’’
But it did. Their plan to travel
by campervan around Italy for a month was off the cards before they even left New Zealand. A festival in Spain, a weekend in the Netherlands – both cancelled.
During a three-day stopover in Singapore, where Walters feared she picked up the virus, the precautions were mildly alarming – many tourist spots closed, temperature screening everywhere.
They arrived in the UK in early March just as cases were going up and up. Boris Johnson’s government was delaying lockdown and talking about herd immunity.
‘‘We thought, we are young, we can help that herd immunity, but there was just so much conflicting science, so many conflicting messages.’’
They went out of town to Rye, on the south coast, for a weekend and when they returned they checked in to an Airbnb to selfisolate. They didn’t think it was fair to stay with friends.
‘‘We were both almost 100 per cent sure we had the virus.
‘‘I had a fever for two days and a cough that lasted for weeks, and I never get sick! Michael had had a bad cold. We didn’t know if it was just a Tube flu or Covid.’’
With European borders now open, some of their friends are booking trips away. The couple are staying put for the time being in the north London flat they moved into during the early days of lockdown.
They hope to be able to travel before too long, but ‘‘who knows what’s going to happen?’’, she says.
It would certainly take some pretty serious personal or family issue to get her home before her visa runs its course, though. And if they did decide to return while the 14-day quarantine was still obligatory, she’d be willing to pay if she could.
Getting returning Kiwis to pay for quarantine should be means-tested, she says. ‘‘I don’t think we should get into a situation where only the rich can travel, especially where there are people who have essential travel needs.’’
It’s unfair for people to go on holiday just because they can afford it, potentially spread the virus, then take up a quarantine room on their return that someone who had to travel for essential purposes could have used, she says.
‘‘I think it’s fair I should pay. I understand how expenses were covered for returning New Zealanders in quarantine early on and believe that was fair and right. [But] I think it’s a big ask of the taxpayer at the moment, with the economy set to hurt for a long time, to continue paying for those who don’t need to travel or who could afford to pay for their quarantine.’’
The anti-expat rhetoric has been sad, though, she says. She wasn’t impressed with Duncan Garner’s call to close the borders to everyone, including Kiwis.
People’s circumstances change, people lose their jobs, their health may become impaired. You should never lock someone out of their own country, she says. ‘‘As a New Zealand citizen you have certain rights. You could make people stateless by denying them return to their country.’’
The world is waking up, borders are opening and Kiwi travellers are being welcomed as ‘‘safe’’ visitors. But as Europe opens the gates this month, few Kiwis are taking the opportunity to travel there for a jolly.
It’s great news that the EU has included New Zealand in its safe list, but the reality of a Greek island getaway may still be a few steps away, says Victoria Courtney, Flight Centre general manager, product.
The New Zealand Government organisation SafeTravel strongly recommends that Kiwis do not travel overseas yet, not just because of the infection risk, but the difficulty of returning home.
‘‘Flight routes remain very limited, and they likely will continue that way until New Zealand too softens its border restrictions,’’ Courtney says. ‘’On return, travellers should be prepared for a mandatory twoweek managed isolation period and the chance that they may have to foot the bill for this too.’’
Courtney says ticket sales on some destinations are down by as far as 90 per cent compared with June 2019.
The top countries booked by Flight Centre in June were Australia, United Kingdom, Fiji, New Zealand (domestic) and the Cook Islands, though most were people repatriating, Kiwis going to ‘’lock down’’ with family overseas, or people visiting sick or dying relatives.