Those who leave: travel in a global pandemic
In July 2020, around the time that travel became possible again, I jotted down a quote from the medieval Persian poet Rumi: ‘Don’t move the way fear makes you move – move the way love makes you move.’ Fear and love are conflicting feelings, and they manifest as diametric opposites in the body. Fear, a contracted state, will keep you small and still. You’ll crouch or use your arms as a shield. Love, on the other hand, is expansive - it begs you to look outwards and move towards something. During the past two years, the risk of contagion has made us afraid and therefore static. If we move, travel or connect, there’s a high chance that we’ll get sick, or worse, infect someone else. Even when the travel bans were lifted, movement had to be restricted. Every idea of a journey had to pass through rigorous filters of safety, ease and expense. Did we really have to go? What were the risks and how could they be managed? Some journeys made the cut – were deemed worth it, despite the added frictions of getting there. The need to reconnect with family, or a part of yourself that can blossom in an as yet unseen place, is just too great. Love gives you momentum, if not as the cliché would have it, wings. Those of us privileged enough to scrap together enough time, money, vaccines and other anti-Covid measures, have gone.
​
When the great stasis was imposed, in March 2020, I was a year and a half into my life in San Sebastián. I was working as a freelance writer and living in a tiny converted-office studio that had a shady balcony with an oblique view of the beach. My family suggested that I should return to London, a place that had been home for longer, but I refused, because that was not where my heart was. I was newly in a relationship, had friends who lived close by and relied upon beach-walks and sea-swimming for my sanity. I intended to stay and weather the lockdown, however long it lasted. The Spanish authorities initially estimated two weeks; I anticipated that it wouldn’t be more than three before I was swimming again. In fact, it would be two months before we were allowed to leave our homes for any other purpose than grocery shopping. In case you are interested in reading about what that first and most drastic lockdown in San Sebastián was like, I wrote about it here.
In the following year, seasons of ten o’clock curfew and perimetral border restrictions were interspersed with more relaxed times when we could board a train and sometimes even a plane. During the stricter periods, San Sebastián became my entire world. I could just about trick myself that there was nothing beyond its horseshoe bay, the thimble shaped mountain next door, the little social life of beach walks and outdoor dining in the rain. More than most places, San Sebastián would be where you’d want to get stuck if you couldn’t leave. Still, whenever laws, funds and timing allowed, I jumped at the opportunity to reclaim my suitcase self.
Travelling restored not only my hope, but my feeling of control. Being able to plan a journey, meet all the pandemic-related obstacles and have much-longed for experiences, gave me a sense of achievement. The journeys, with their clear beginning, middle and end, stood in stark contrast to the more muddled, uncertainty-fraught time of being at home, waiting out the pandemic and enduring all its subsequent effects on life and career. If travel was a distraction from real life, it also felt like the realest version of life, as I left home and laptop behind and went out to meet the world.
​
The journeys I have made since the start of the pandemic are special, in part because of the added challenges I faced in going. All too conscious of my risk of contagion and the environmental cost of displacement, I was not as carefree a traveller as before. Going by the current rate of global warming and natural disasters, it’s essential that travel should be more restricted and monitored than in the pre-pandemic era. I wonder whether pandemic protocol will be a rehearsal for a future of increasing environmental degradation. To travel is not to escape from responsibility; your duty to others and the planet comes along with you.
At the beginning of 2022, I have no idea whether these memories are archives of an extraordinary time, or if they document the start of a new era in travel.
Journeys taken since March 2020
​
Point of origin: San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain
​
June 2020, Saint Jean de Luz, France
July 2020, Pasaia, Basque Country
July-August 2020, London
October 2020, Logroño, Haro in La Rioja, Spain
December 2020, Bordeaux, Angers, France
April 2021, Hondarribia, Hernani, Deba-Zumaia, Zarautz, Basque Country
July 2021, Madrid
July-August 2021, London
September 2021, Saint Jean de Luz, France
October 2021, Aragón, Jaca and Zaragoza, Spain; Pau, France.
November 2021, Biarritz, Guéthary, France
December 2021, Valencia, Spain
​