I've not written anything about travel since the end of last year, for reasons that I'm sure will be obvious.

I'd pretty much assumed, even before 2020 ended, that we wouldn't be leaving Malaysia, and possibly wouldn't even be leaving Sarawak, until the last quarter of 2021. This assumption has been borne out.

Two things have surprised me, though. Shocked, I suppose, is a better word.

The first is how little internal travel has been possible. We've basically been locked into our home district since mid-January. The furthest we have travelled all year is about eight kilometres (to the hospital and the vaccination centre...)

The second is how difficult external travel still is even now (we're about to embark on planning a trip to the UK to see family, and the hurdles and conundrums are daunting, to say the least).


Guangzhou, China, 2018. Back in the days when...



As Thomas Wright argued at the beginning of this month, "Current [travel] limitations are a patchwork effort with seemingly little science or reason behind them... No one believes the restrictions will remain indefinitely, but no timetable or process exists for deciding when they will end. Almost no international coordination on the issue has occurred."

It is not surprising, then, that in early June, nearly half of United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) experts who took part in a global survey said they didn't expect international tourism to return to 2019 levels until 2024 or later.

Not that we actually want to see those levels return, what with climate change and all...

Still, it's a sobering prediction, especially as countries that relied on tourism in the past have suffered an unprecedented "travel shock".



Towards the end of July, Kirsten Alana did a bit of a sampling among people in different parts of the world about how they were feeling about travelling. The answers were, unsurprisingly, very different, depending on how the respondent's region was faring (economically and pandemically) at that point. Major differences were notable even among respondents in the same country.

So what's the end game? We just don't know... As a much-cited article by Ed Yong pointed out a couple of weeks ago, "The 'zero covid' dream of fully stamping out the virus is a fantasy. Instead, the pandemic ends when almost everyone has immunity, preferably because they were vaccinated or alternatively because they were infected and survived."

And of course, we have no idea how long it will take us to get to that point, especially given the way humanity has bungled its vaccination response...

If only we'd got our act together on a global level, instead of letting the situation disintegrate into a nationalistic free-for-all where the rich countries were bound to come out best. The Economist estimates that vaccine inequity will cost the global economy USD 2.3 trillion over the period 2022-25 (quite aside, of course, from the risks of more variants developing). What a whirlwind we are sowing...



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On to travel and the internet. James Clark recently took the opportunity afforded by Viet Nam lockdowns to compile a really fascinating history of digital nomads.

It was also courtesy of his Nomadic Notes newsletter that I came across this account of the genesis of internet travel booking. We first reserved accommodation on the internet in 1997. By then there was already a buzzing web travel scene, it seems, but for us at that point such bookings were the exception rather than the rule.

Will the days of carefree, just-book-and-go travel ever return, I wonder. Should they even? It was never carefree for many people, of course...

At the moment I can't imagine this ever getting better, but maybe I'm just succumbing to availability bias.

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And finally, inability to travel has recently taken on different, quite excruciating dimensions, in the shape of the botched US evacuation of Afghan allies from Kabul.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, who grew up among Vietnamese refugees so traumatized by the fall of Saigon that they named the month when it happened "Black April", and commemorated it every year, regrets that refugee stories so rarely get the billing as "war stories" that they deserve: "We keep hearing that Americans are suffering from war fatigue -- but how many stories do we read or hear or see about American soldiers at war compared to stories of refugees created by wars led by the United States? Civilian war stories disturb our mind-set of conducting perpetual warfare as an unquestioned American privilege."