Travelling during the Covid-19 Pandemic
This is a topic I've been wanting to write about since the beginning of March, but haven't had the time until the beginning of April so I apologise for the delay.
However, let's get into a topic that quite a few of you will be very interested in and the rest may be a little envious of (believe me, that is not the reason I am writing this). This is the story of how my family were lucky enough to travel to Malaysia during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Grab a drink and get comfortable, this is going to be a long one!
Firstly, travelling during the pandemic is NOT easy. My wife and I were looking at multiple groups and websites during our research to see if it was even possible to fly and all that we kept seeing were tales of heartache and frustration. Husbands away from wife's, children unable to see their parents who were on their deathbed, people having to revoke job offers as they could not be granted access to the country. There were no clear guidelines on who could or couldn't enter Malaysia but we still wanted to see if we would be fortunate enough to be granted.
To start with, you need to contact the Malaysian Government and request a landing authorisation from them. This is a lengthy online form where you need to fill in lots questions about each potential traveller and their reason for requesting access to travel. This is then read by a government worker who decides whether your reason is valid or not, and then decides whether to grant you access. As our reason basically boiled down to "my wife has not seen her family in 2 years" we were not expecting it to be good news. However, we very lucky in that our application was approved. We had heard of hundreds of people applying multiple times for similar reasons to us but being rejected each time, so we were shocked at how quickly we were approved.
I then had to agree my leave with my employer. As we were planning on being in Malaysia for a month it needs to be specially approved (2 to 3 weeks is generally ok in most UK companies, anything more than that needs special approval). My manager had to contact the Heads of HR and my division to confirm if this would even be ok. They did say yes, but that I had to accept that if anything happened in Malaysia, i.e. I caught Covid, then this was my responsibility and they would have to evaluate my position. This may sound harsh, but I was putting myself in some kind of danger by travelling so I understood and accepted this.
With the seemingly more difficult parts of the operation complete we then had to book flights and a quaratine hotel. The flights were quite cheap, as no one is travelling, but the quaratine hotel was not (I'll get to that in a moment). We booked Qatar Aiways flights from London to Doha, then Doha to Kuala Lumpur as this was the easiest and most direct route that we could find. For the 4 of us it was around £800 (in normal times my flight to KL was around £500 so this was pretty good). I did then look for travel insurance, as I always like to make sure I have it, but none of the providers would cover us as we were choosing to travel during a pandemic, so this was then just forgotten about and we just made sure not to lose anything.
The quaratine hotel is something else that you need to arrange before you enter the country, along with a mountain of paperwork like photocopies of documents etc. As 3 of us hold UK passports we were subject to "foreigner charges" totalling nearly £500 each. Then you have to arrange for the hotel on top of this for upto 2 weeks (or 7 days if you get a PCR test 72hrs before arrival, so we chose to do this and got a test near Heathrow airport). They have 2 tiers to this system, you can ever choose the standard tier which is cheaper but you don't get to choose where you go, which is perfect for single travellers, or the Premium Package where you select the hotel and are given preferential treatment when landing at KL International. As we were travelling with 2 young children we decided to pay a little extra and go for this.
Now that all of our paperwork was complete and submitted, we had arranged for everything and spent a small fortune, we can travel!
Entering Heathrow Airport was like entering a ghost town. There was a handful of passengers who were outnumbered by staff, the normal noise of Heathrow replaced with silence. We made our way to the baggage checkin and were asked for all of the documents that we needed to provide, like confirmation of quaratine hotel booking etc (you are asked this a few times). Security was quite quick as there was no one there, and then we got on the plane. The news the week before we travelled was of loads of Instagram "influencers" escaping the UK and flying to Dubai, and our plane looked no different. It was FULL! Lots of people trying to escape and fly to the Middle East due to their relatively light restrictions at the time and apparently Qatar was their destination. Everyone has to wear a facemask at all time, and social distancing was a little difficult due to the amount of people. Our connecting flight from Doha to KL was EMPTY so this was not a problem at all. The staff were incredibly helpful and friendly too so the whole experience, whilst slightly stressful due to wanting to avoid catching Covid and losing my job, was made much better by them.
Upon landing in KL everything changed. After seeing how lax the UK response to covid is ("please wear a mask, ok don't worry about it, just follow our rules, ok don't", that kind of approach) Malaysia take it SERIOUSLY! There were a huge amount of desks that you needed to approach and submit certain documents to, or have your temperature taken, everything we had prepared for. Foreigners normally have to wait the longest, but as we had 2 young children and my wife spoke some Malay to the right person, we were moved up the list to get our paperwork checked. However, it still took over 2 hours to get through the airport and collect our bags (I've never spent more than 20 minutes in that airport, so again a huge difference). At the end of this we walked past the people who were waiting for the Standard Package, and they had been their for quite some time. Premium Package just had to wait for 5 minutes for a staff member to take us from Immigration to collect our bags and then go to the taxi's. Our taxi driver was wearing a full hazmat suit, the seats were covered in plastic, our bags were sprayed with cleaning materials before we got in the taxi. The drive took about an hour to get to our hotel and we had to drive through multiple military checkpoints on the way, each time needing to provide documents to prove that our journey was necessary. After approximately 20 hours of travel we arrived at our quaratine hotel, the Hilton in KL.
The Hilton is exactly how you would expect, an extravagant hotel and the highest level of customer service. The difference from its usual self was hazmat suits, no exit from your room for the full length of your stay (there are alarms on all of the doors), and a mandatory Covid test on day 5. The test was awful, the Malaysian doctors push the cotton bud further up your nose than the English doctors do, and it was made worse as we had bad jetlag on that particular day so we were woken up by the doctor who then proceeded to assault our nostrils!
Our room was incredible, very spacious and comfortable with a great view. We were sent 3 meals every day at set times, and the food was surprisingly delicious and varied. We had Chinese, Indian, Western, Japanese and Malaysian dishes and no duplicate meals at all so we were always looking forward to our meals. On top of this you can order from set fast food chains during your stay if you like (things like McDonald's and KFC) and the staff would bring it to you as well, but this was only during certain times. Overall, quaratine wasn't as bad as we thought it was going to be. Dare I say, we quite enjoyed it.
One week of our time in Malaysia has already passed and we can finally leave quaratine. We had a pre-booked taxi from the hotel to my in-laws house and we left KL to go back to my wife's hometown. There were less checkpoints this time, and not as much plastic in the taxi, but still the same precautions and serious response to the virus remained. It was incredibly emotional to finally see them again, but I won't go into too much detail here. We did, however, manage to have a Chinese New Year Reunion dinner which meant a lot to my wife and was one of many highlights of the trip.
So, do you want to know the difference between England and Malaysia in terms of their response to the pandemic? Malaysians take it SERIOUSLY! We travelled around a little, mostly to local malls to get the essentials and buy some of the food and drinks we had been missing (we went to Tea Live to buy bubble tea wayyy too many times). At each mall, shop, petrol station etc that you enter you must be wearing a mask, you must take your temperature, and you must check in on an app called MySejahtera (similar to the NHS Covid-19 app but, you know, it works and it's much better). If you refuse to do even one of these things you aren't allowed to enter the building. There is security at every door, some are armed, and they won't let you in until you have done those 3 things. This stops the spread of the virus and the Malaysian people seem to be ok with doing these 3 things. It's simple, right? So why do we have idiots in the west who refuse to even wear a mask?
Another thing that was new this time was security checkpoints everywhere that we drove. I know I've already mentioned it, but it cannot be overstated. If you wanted to travel between states, which we needed to, you need to get prior approval at your local Police Station and they can determine whether or not your journey is valid. For example, my wife's family live in the state of Negeri Sembilan and we needed to travel to Kuala Lumpur for medical appointments. This is acceptable travel, but if you wanted to do the same journey to go shopping in the many malls in KL, well the police wouldn't like kindly upon that and just refuse your application. No it's, no buts. Again, it may seem harsh but this makes perfect sense during a pandemic so maybe other countries *cough* England *cough* could take some notes.
The police checkpoints and approval did lead to something I found quite funny. We drove to KL for the day as we needed to check an apartment (not going into details here, you never know who is reading lol) and had no problem at all. However, when coming back to the my wife's hometown the police stopped us at the roadblock and started asking a lot of questions. My wife started speaking in Malay to them, of which I understood a few words so had an idea of what was being said. She said the words "United Kingdom" followed by some Malay, then the policeman bent down to look through the window, looked at me, laughed and then waved us through. My wife then told me that he was questioning why we had gone, she explained the reasons and said that "my husband and I have come from the UK", he then looked through the window to see a white guy sitting there and then totally agreed with everything she had said and let us through. Not sure if this is white privilege in action (I hope not) or something else, but we all found it quite funny.
The final point I should make is about returning to England. Firstly you need to take another Covid-19 PCR test 72hours before boarding your flight. We found a place that gives you results within 15 minutes so we drove there. We had the test taken whilst in the car, waited for 5 minutes and the negative results were handed to us then and there. Once again, Malaysia has beaten England at the simple things. Anyway, the next thing we needed to do was get the police permit that I mentioned above so that we can go to the airport. Once this was done all that was left was to pack and make our way to the airport. KLIA was even more empty than Heathrow had been. Apart from my family there were approximately 10 other passengers that I could see, the majority of people in the airport were staff. Multiple security checkpoints around the airport to check Covid symptoms etc but otherwise it was a pretty quick journey through the airport to then board our 2 relatively empty flights back.
Heathrow though. How can I put this in a way that doesn't sound horrible. Ummm, it was... Challenging? Firstly, you get off of the plane and are divided into 2 different lines. One is for low risk countries (Malaysia being one of them), the other is High Risk countries. At the time that we landed many African countries had just been added to that list, so from what we could tell the majority of people in that line were from Africa. The 2 lines are separated by a small fabric barrier at waist height (I don't remember the name of them, sorry!) so if someone from the high risk countries did have the virus, or vice versa, everyone in that hall would have it. Anyway, the low risk line didn't look too long but it still took almost 3 hours to get through it. There are 6 desks at the top that you are trying to get to, but only 2 of them were manned when we landed. People were exhausted, hungry, thirsty and just wanted to get out of the airport so that we could social distance a bit better but nothing was speeding up this line. Once we got to the front there was an argument between another passenger and the staff, with the passenger giving them ways to improve the experience then using the classic management phrase of "if I ran my company like this I would be out of a job", so I did what I could to avoid that area! When we did reach the front the border control agent looked at our passports, made a little joke about the argument, and then sent us on our way. We had had to pay for a home quarantine kit, fill in a passenger locator form, and arrange various other things that I was informed I would need to enter the country and none of this was checked (my home quarantine kit of 2 covid tests also didn't arrive and I got a refund, so it was a royal shitshow all around lol). We then went to baggage reclaim to collect our stuff that had been sitting next to the carousel for an eternity and then got in our taxi.
The approach by England to this is abysmal at best. Hardly any safety precautions were followed, privatised Covid tests didn't arrive (£240 per person by the way, so not cheap! I guess some Tory MP's friend is making a fortune from not delivering again!), and just a lack of any foresight into how they can manage the situation.
I'm kind of running out of points now so I'm going to wrap this up. Travelling during a pandemic is difficult, scary, exhausting and above all EXPENSIVE. However, if you need to do it for the right reasons then it is totally worth it. Just remember to stay safe, sanitise everywhere you go, only mix with a very small amount of people, and follow all of the rules!
Would I do it again? Probably. It was worth it to see the look on my wife's face as she saw her family for the first time in almost 2 years, and for my in-laws to finally meet their first grandchildren and see the joy on their faces too. I got to finally connect with my brother-in-law, who bought way too many fireworks for Chinese New Year that we set off together (and nearly destroyed the road lol), and also have deep meaningful conversations with both my mother and father in law. The personal interactions were worth the huge financial expense, money can always be earned again but time is finite.
And with that profound, semi-intelligent sounding statement I shall finally end this post. If you stayed until the end, I applaud you! I want to blog a bit more frequently now, so I shall be hoping to post something again soon (something much shorter too!). Stay safe!
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