Flying home in a Covid lockdown

Our experience of being abroad in March 2020 when Covid-19 hit. Continued from here.

A view of Corralejo town on our first day. We never got a chance to return.

Throughout our week in limbo as the hotel closed down around us, we got to know some of the other guests. Several had been moved into our hotel from elsewhere in the resort, as accommodation across the island began to shut down. Travellers with flights booked for Manchester, Glasgow and Bristol were put on flights to Gatwick. Couples and families who didn't have airport transfers sorted had to book one taxi per person - such were the rules in lockdown Spain, as taxis were not allowed to carry more than one passenger each.

After a long week holed up in a hotel room waiting and worrying, checking the notice boards multiple times a day for updates, we left on Saturday 21 March, on our original flight, but even that didn't go without several hitches. 

With so many guests now on flights that day, and Spain's rules changed so that the first few rows of coaches were out of bounds to keep the driver safe, TUI had failed to provide enough coaches to transfer everyone to the airport. A Hunger Games-style scramble for seats took place before we'd even left the hotel. When we did finally pull out of those gates, a cheer went up, a coachful of passengers jubilant at escaping their palm-lined prison.

Arriving at the airport, we were confronted with the most chaotic check-in situation I've ever seen. With so many people being bumped from now-cancelled flights to other destinations in the UK, the whole process was understandably taking far longer than normal. Looking back now, it's absolutely mad that we were standing in a heaving crowd for more than an hour, with no social distancing, in a country that was in one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe at the time.

Airside in the airport, things were far from normal. Several of the cafes, restaurants and shops in the terminal were closed at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon, and signs everywhere warned travellers to keep a 2m distance from airport staff. Anyone who overstepped the 2m mark was embarrassed into retreating by a customer service supervisor armed with a megaphone and a tirade in Spanish. We later found out that the airport itself was closing down that night - we were literally on the last plane off of the island, with other UK-bound flights and a couple of German destinations the only others on the departure board.

As a result of the check-in chaos, all UK flights were a couple of hours late boarding. At this point, the atmosphere teetered between relief of getting out of there, and fear that our flight may still be cancelled, and we'd be stuck on an island where literally everything was closing that night. A couple from Wales, originally due to fly into Bristol, told us their son-in-law was having to drive all the way from Swansea to Gatwick to meet them due to their flight being changed.

Hours later than planned, we were seated on the plane, doors secured for departure, ready to taxi to the runway... when it was announced that a passenger had been taken ill at the back of the plane, and that he, his family and their luggage was being removed. The process took over an hour, during which time the cabin staff began chatting to passengers, telling us that it was their last flight for the foreseeable future, and they'd been advised by their employer to apply for a job in Tesco in the meantime. To this day, we don't know whether the unwell passenger was a Covid case or an unrelated illness, but he was transferred into an ambulance waiting on the runway. I do wonder what happened to his family, removed from the last flight and left on an island where all accommodation was closed.

Finally, we took off, and the mood on board was a jovial one, awash with relief at the thought of getting back to home soil. We were heading for Gatwick, with passengers originally booked for other airports including Manchester being provided with coaches to complete their journey. Around quarter to midnight, shortly before we were due to land in Gatwick, the pilot came on the tannoy and announced that Gatwick were refusing us permission to land as they didn't have the ground staff (in hindsight, they had probably already furloughed or made redundant many staff by this point) so we were heading to Stansted. I remember holding my breath as the announcement finished, expecting people to riot at the news of another disruption to an already extremely delayed journey. Instead, the whole plane burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation, a mood once again buoyed by the relief that we were almost home.

Almost... but not quite. We were braced to go through some sort of medical screening at Stansted. Would we have our temperatures taken? Be questioned on where we'd been or who we'd been with? How long would we be told to isolate? In reality, in the early hours of that Sunday morning, we were waved through security with barely a glance at our passports, and not even handed a leaflet about Covid. We couldn't believe it. This was less than 48 hours before Boris Johnson made his first TV address, putting us into our first lockdown (I've talked more about this before). A year on, and things have barely changed regarding Covid border controls.

Covid, one year on: Stuck in Fuerteventura

A view from one of the hotel pools. Initially, there were sunbeds below those umbrellas, but they soon disappeared.

A year ago today, we set off on holiday. Nothing unusual about that - it's become a privileged habit in recent years for us to go on holiday in February/March, an ideal time of year for escaping the doom and gloom of the British winter while also dodging the higher travel prices of school holidays. Two years ago, we went to Jamaica, and three years ago our destination was Cuba, but this time, we settled for the short-haul destination of Fuerteventura - which turned out to be a wise choice, all things considered.

This holiday was to be a memorable one, for all the wrong reasons.

On 10 March 2020, Covid-19 was lurking in the background. There had been a few cases in the UK, but nothing too alarming - certainly nothing to give any indication of the sheer magnitude of chaos it was poised to unleash. A month previously, a hotel in Tenerife had hit UK headlines when it was put into lockdown due to a Covid outbreak, but other than that, reports of Covid in Europe were few and far between, with the press still focusing on the situation in China.

Arriving at Gatwick early that Tuesday morning, bleary-eyed from the early hour, and wrapped up in the nervous anticipation that comes with travelling, we checked into our flight with nothing amiss. It was only once we'd cleared security and bagged a table for an airside breakfast at Jamie's Italian that a glance at the departures board revealed that all flights for Italy - and only Italy - were disrupted. Unusually, the flights weren't declared as 'cancelled'. Instead, passengers for those flights were directed to the Information desk. At this point, we assumed that the issue was Covid related, perhaps that Italy had closed its borders to all but Italian residents. Our assumptions were proven correct in the coming days when Italy was faced with the biggest Covid outbreak seen in Europe to date.

We intended to return to Corralejo. We never got a chance.

Aside from a broken tooth incident (not mine) on the plane, our journey to Fuerteventura went uninterrupted, and our holiday got underway. Our hotel, the Riu Oliva Beach Resort, was split into two parts - the main hotel building, and a series of motel-style rooms on walkways in the gardens opposite. We were in the latter, and despite our initial frustration at trying to find our room in the sweltering heat, suitcases in tow, the isolated location of our room turned out to be both a blessing and a worry.

The following day, our first full day on holiday, was spent tracking down a dentist in the town of Corralejo to deal with the broken tooth. Emergency dentistry compete, we took the opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with the town, which we had visited eight years previously, and spent the morning recognising shops and cafes, admiring the new additions and planning what we'd visit when we returned to the town centre in a couple of days time for the market - and which ferry we'd catch over to Lanzarote for a day trip the following week. How naïve we were.

The next couple of days passed in a blur of beach days, pool dips, and evening cocktails. Gradually though, things began to change. Posters in the hotel lobby advertising a local festival the following week had 'cancelled' stickers plastered over them. Word went around among the hotel guests that the town market we'd been planning to visit on Friday was cancelled. Guests were checking out, but nobody seemed to be checking in to replace them. Covid was coming, but we still had no idea of the magnitude. 

'Soon there will be more goats than people', we joked, until suddenly, it wasn't so funny.

As a rule, I don't use the internet on holiday - my job revolves around the internet and social media, and emails, so I like to switch off when I'm away. The same with TV - I rarely watch it on holiday. However, this time we were tuning into the BBC World News channel in our hotel room every evening, mainly out of curiosity as to how the Covid situation was shaping up elsewhere, rather than any real concern that it might affect us on our little island in the Atlantic.

On Saturday 14 March, everything changed. Laying on a sunbed by the pool, half dozing, half earwigging on other guests' conversations, we heard the alarming news that holiday companies had cancelled all flights into and holidays in the Canary Islands with immediate effect, and some were evacuating tourists immediately. I ran back to our room to grab my phone and see the news - and from that point onwards, I was glued to the screen, refreshing news live feeds, for the entire holiday. It was true, flights in were cancelled, with planes being sent over empty from the UK to get people out, and Spain was heading towards a lockdown.

We returned from lunch one day to find the pool taped off.

The next day, Sunday, signs went up around the hotel that the majority of the restaurants and bars were closing, with all guests directed to the one remaining dining room for all meals. After a morning by the pool, we went to lunch, and returned to find the pool taped off, all sunbeds stacked up, leaving a deck area which had been lively two hours previously completely barren. For me, that was when the seriousness of the situation hit. The hotel - and the island - was literally closing down around us. The gate out of the hotel to the beach was locked, as Spain declared its beaches closed. Lifeguard shacks were boarded up, beach flags removed unceremoniously from their flagpoles. The sea and the pools glistened temptingly, so close to us, but completely out of bounds.

With little else to do, and no further information, we returned to our hotel room for the afternoon. By now, it was clear that our holiday was over, but we still had six days until our flight home, the following Saturday. 

The next morning, TUI called a meeting for its guests at the hotel. Pack your cases and be ready to leave at any moment, we were told. TUI was getting customers off the island as quickly as possible, and we could be called up for an available flight at any time. At the very latest, we would be leaving by Saturday 21 March, our original departure date, as all Spanish hotels had to close down by law on that day.

Cats joined the goats in taking over the hotel.

We had only heard about this meeting from talking to other guests, and when we asked the TUI rep, he was offensively dismissive about our concerns that the message hadn't reached us, and did nothing to quell our fears that news about an earlier flight might also fail to reach us. A year on, this is what makes me most angry about the whole situation - I won't go into too much detail, lest this descends into a rant, but a tiny improvement in communication on TUI's part would have gone a long way to relieving a lot of worry for a lot of people.

We had no idea what was going on elsewhere in Spain or even on the island, other than TV news clips which showed Spanish armed police patrolling streets in Madrid and Barcelona. Our hotel was out in the remote sand dunes, a distance from the town centre - ironically, a location we had admired on our previous trip. The main news from back home was a wave of panic buying, and a shortage of food in British supermarkets. As is normal when going on holiday, we'd left our fridge fairly empty, planning to stock it up on our return. The possibility of returning to empty supermarket shelves and no way of obtaining food became a worry at the back of our minds, but it was a secondary worry in comparison to the main one confronting us - when (and if) we were going to get back home. 

The beach, before it was closed down completely.

It seems crazy to say this now, given the events of the past year and the criticism the UK government had received for its slow actions, but we spent that week worrying that the UK borders would close before we could make it home. With little else to do, and nothing else occupying our minds, we spent each day flicking between English-speaking news channels and watched as one by one, countries closed their borders. Italy, Australia, New Zealand - some weren't even allowing residents to fly back to their homelands. Elsewhere, cruise ships became stranded with thousands of passengers aboard. Between the fear of the borders closing before we could get back, and the fear of missing a message about a new flight, I barely slept for days.

Fewer and fewer guests appeared at hotel mealtimes every day until only the British were left - German, Swedish and French voices slowly disappeared. It was at this point that we became grateful that our room was over the other side of the complex - the five-minute walk between there and the main hotel building for meals was our only experience of the outside world. Guests staying in the main hotel building didn't even have that, just a short ride in the lift down from their room to the restaurant, and back again.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Laura Reynolds (@scribbling_lau)

Day by day, the hotel's resident heard of semi-wild goats quickly went from source of light entertainment to something more sinister - a symbol of humans being run out of the hotel. Our early jokes that there would soon by more goats than people became less amusing by the day, as we sat in our room hearing suitcases being wheeled along the corridor outside, the sound of our fellow guests checking out and flying for the safety of their home countries. Being out on our own, on the other side of the hotel, the only remaining occupied room in the vicinity, it became very isolated, which heightened our fear of being forgotten about/abandoned by Tui. They could have shut the hotel down completely, every member of staff abandoning their posts, and we wouldn't know anything about it until we next walked over to the main building for a meal.

One day, the only human we saw over our side of the complex was our room cleaner. In my broken Spanish, I ascertained that as of that Saturday, she was losing her job after more than 20 years of working at the hotel, not knowing when or even if she'd be back. Despite the sadness of the situation and the sympathy I felt for her, I still wasn't visualising the situation as something that would last for more than a few weeks, maximum two months. A year on, I wonder what happened to her. Has she got her job back? Has the hotel even reopened since we were among the last guests to check out 12 months ago?

To be continued.

The whole picture: February 2021

Another month in lockdown done and dusted. Still, there's 'light at the end of the tunnel', thanks to the planned lockdown lifting dates. Is anyone else fed up of the phrase 'light at the end of the tunnel' yet? It's like the 2021 equivalent of 2020's 'unprecedented situation'. I digress - as with last month, I haven't left my hometown, seen any friends or been anywhere exciting, so I'll keep this as a brief summary of the things I've been up to within my own four walls.

What I've been reading in February

After getting back into reading in January, February has been a bit slower - I've only managed to complete five books, and my aim of clearing my to-be-read shelves by May is slipping away from me. 

• Two For Joy by Helen Chandler - The problem with having a to-read pile which is literally years long, is that sometimes a book you've already read finds its way back onto it - and you're a decent way through it before you realise it's all sounding a bit familiar. The fact that I got so far through it without sounding familiar tells you all you need to know about how unmemorable this book is. An average romantic story about not particularly likeable characters, awkwardly written at times.
• Tell It To The Skies by Erica James - What I expected to be an average easy read turned out to be a hugely compelling story, told across several decades. Beautifully written, the story of Lydia's troubled upbringing goes from drama to mystery, before all is explained in the final pages, set in modern-day Venice. Thoroughly recommend.
• The Book of Echoes by Rosanna Amaka - Never judge a book by the cover, or even the first few pages. I was ready to give up on this one when the opening chapter focused on the spirit of a woman who escaped the slave trade haunting London's docks - as I mentioned last month, I struggle to read anything that involves the supernatural. Perseverance proved worthwhile though, as spirits quickly segued into the stories of two contemporary young black people, each overcoming their own struggles, growing up in Nigeria and Brixton respectively. It's very much a book about race, with themes that ring stronger than ever (a mention of the unsuitability of some of the statues dotted around London feels particularly prophetic, given events of the last year).
• Lovers & Newcomers by Rosie Thomas - This story of a group of retirees and near-retirees, who all move into a country estate together having been friends since university, could have been significantly shorter than the 500+ pages it covers. It's refreshing to see a contemporary novel focusing on the lives, loves and problems of the older generation for once, rather than 20 and 30 somethings. Their individual stories are skilfully recounted and interwoven, all emerging around the centrepiece of the unearthed burial site of an Iron Age Princess - a factor made all the more interesting by my recent watching of The Dig. 
• Hemingway's Chair by Michael Palin - Another victim of my years-long to be read pile, I picked up Palin's first novel with the intention to read it ahead of my trip to Cuba... in 2018. Three years and one global pandemic later, I cracked it open, with high hopes given the author,  and I'm sorry to say, I was disappointed. Impressively, it manages to be simultaneously dull and far-fetched, telling the story of a Post Office worker's life in a small village, his obsession with Hemingway, and... well, that's where it all gets a bit weird. 

As I write this, I've just read the first few compelling pages of The Zanzibar Wife by Deborah Rodriquez - stand by for a review of that one next month.

What I've been watching in February

• To All The Boys: Always and Forever - Yes, it's cheesy, but teenage high school rom-coms like this are right up my street. After loving the first two films, I was keen to see this third instalment, but found it a bit disappointing. The storyline echoes that of The Kissing Booth 2, and Lara-Jean's dilemma over which college to attend doesn't really warrant a whole film. That said, the ending is left wide open for a college years sequel, so fingers crossed for a follow-up film with a new setting to freshen it up. On the plus side, I've added The Little Cupcake Bake Shop to my new York itinerary, when I finally visit.
• The Late Show - Following my philosophy that anything starring the fantastic Emma Thompson is worth a watch, I chose this film to fill a quiet afternoon, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Thompson plays an American TV host, whose career is about to come to an end, with Mindy Kaling as a (too) keen new writer on her show.
• The Judge - A lawyer returns to his hometown for his mother's funeral, where he reconnects with his estranged family. While he's there, his father - the town judge - is accused of murder. A watchable film that encompasses both comedy and sentiment, though it definitely could have been significantly shorter than its 2h22m runtime.
• Leap Year - I put this one on in the background while doing some baking, and it did the job. Entirely predictable, from the moment a high-flying, high-fashion American woman sets foot into a tiny village pub in the Irish countryside, and encounters the unwelcoming barman. You can probably already see where it's going, can't you? 

• Crime Scene: The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel - A four-part Netflix documentary series telling the true story of the disappearance of student Eliza Lam at the infamous Cecil Hotel in LA. Without giving too much away, it's creepy, fascinating and compelling... until the final episode when the majority of the evidence is explained away.
• Sex and the City - I've been powering my way through all of the original SATC series, ahead of the release of the new mini-series. As I waded through it, I couldn't help but wonder... how did this series ever get so popular? Unlikeable characters, unrealistic lives... I know it was groundbreaking in its content when it was first released, but in 2021 it comes across as outdated (and I don't just mean Carrie's dresses).
• Wonder - A lovely, feel-good family film about a young boy born with facial deformities who starts school for the first time, and faces difficulties interacting with his peers. Nothing groundbreaking, but worth a watch.
• Finding Alice - This TV series seems to have split opinion, and I'm firmly in the 'what was that?' category. I'm a huge fan of Keeley Hawes, but this six-parter about a widow dealing with the aftermath of her partner (not husband - I thought that was going to be an important plot point, but apparently not) is a meandering story with too much going on to really focus on one aspect. I was holding out for a spectacular twist in the final episode which would make the six-hour time investment worthwhile, but it whimpered out without much fanfare. That said, it's been commissioned for a second series, so someone out there must have enjoyed it.

My March playlist is looking pretty meaty already - I've got Behind Her Eyes lined up on Netflix, as I loved the book when I read it a few years back. I've also heard good things about Ginny & Georgia, Firefly Lane and Moxie.

Follow me on Instagram and Twitter to keep up with my latest adventures (I should be so lucky).

See also - what I got up to in:

• January 2021: Not a lot going on
• December 2020: Sewing, mud and Christmas cards.
• November 2020: Scarecrows and Christmas lights.
• October 2020: London, baby!
• September 2020: Seals, beach huts and ice cream.
• August 2020: Cream tea, rooftop jaunts and sunflowers.
• July 2020: Castles, wildflowers, and a return to blogging.