From Arctic Norway to Israel to South America, Pandemic Travel

 

Bodo, Norway, at 2am on June 21 this year.

In the three pandemic years ending this month, I have traveled to twenty-one countries on four continents. I was going to write about traveling this year, the third year of COVID-19, but decided that travel this year is a continuation of the strange travel during all of the pandemic. Since February of 2020, I visited twenty-one countries, seven countries for the first time: four in 2020, three in 2022. 

A Ferrari at the Museum of the 24-hour race at LeMans

From Arctic Norway on the summer solstice to winter in Israel to equatorial Bogata, Columbia, to southeast Poland, to the Republic of Georgia, I made eight trips overseas between February of 2020 and December of this year. 

The cemetery at Omaha Beach in Normandy, France. I visited in 2017

In the three years before the pandemic, from 2017 to 2019, I was in twenty-nine countries, twenty of them for the first time.  Over the six years from 2017 to 2022, I was in thirty-nine different countries, twenty-seven for the first time, on five continents (I haven't been to Australia since 2000). 

Half of the countries I visited for the first time were part of a five-week trip in 2017. It was my first trip to Eastern Europe. I rode a bicycle from Belgrade, Serbia, to Lviv, Ukraine. On that ride I passed through nine countries. After the ride I visited Israel, Monaco and Sweden for the first time, plus returning to nine more countries I had visited before.

In his book Doom Niall Ferguson says he was warning colleagues in late January 2020 that a real pandemic was coming from China and would sweep the world. He was ignored.  He and his colleagues went to the annual Davos conference in early February--the attendees were dismissive.  It was the flu. It was a replay of SARS from the early 2000s.  Ferguson was right. The Davos consensus was wrong.

My February-March 2020 trip was haunted by the looming pandemic. I arrived in Europe February 12, landing in Paris.  I took a train to Darmstadt, Germany, where I met my friend Cliff. We flew from Frankfurt to Israel by way of Rome.  In the Rome airport we were escorted through the terminal by a woman who could have been a Drill Sergeant.  

Of all of Europe, the pandemic was at its worst in Italy. We just made our connecting flight and flew to Tel Aviv. In Jerusalem we stayed inside the walls of the Old City.  We heard that a whole plane of Korean tourists was sent home because of COVID on the plane.  We continued with our tour plans. A week later, I flew to the Republic of Georgia. Cliff flew home. 

I was supposed to visit Kyiv next, but went straight to Athens instead because of COVID reports in Ukraine.  I was supposed to visit Rome after Athens, but stayed in Athens a full week, taking a fast car trip to North Macedonia and Bulgaria. After Athens was supposed to be Rwanda.  But then I thought it would be more difficult to travel from Africa if COVID got worse. So I went to the Pyrenees for a few days, then back to Paris.  

America closed its borders on Friday the 13th in March 2020. Paris started closing around me. My ticket home was for the 17th and was cancelled on that day. I decided to wait and not join the tens of thousands of people trying to return to America on full planes and customs lines a mile long. 

There are worse places to be stuck than Paris.  It turns out bakeries are an essential service in France. I had lovely bakery takeout food to eat while I rode the empty streets of Paris.  My plane left on time and not crowded after all.  JFK airport was empty on the 17th of March. I made a one-way car rental and drove home.

Since the vaccine became available, travel in other countries meant changing rules at each border. But the rules were clear and people complied. Poland and the UK were very relaxed. Germany required masks on trains and planes right up to September of 2022. Brazil still mandates masks on public transportation. 

Outside the U.S. I could know what the rules were and expect those around me would follow the rules. In America, every boundary was a new policy. In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where I live, COVID policy was different in the city than in the rest of the county. It was true all over the country. 

I had no trouble with COVID policy outside America. But inside America, the erratic policy led me to stay away from Red States, except one trip to see the Circuit of the Americas Formula 1 race track in Texas.

For me, traveling in Red State America was the risk not worth taking. Through 2021 and 2022, the anti-vaxxers clogged hospitals. People who needed other treatments could not get care in facilities overwhelmed with idiots. 

When I first heard about the pandemic, a doctor I respect very much said the pandemic would last three years then we would start living with it. He was right. In the coming year, I expect COVID will be in the background in most of the free world. The countries ruled by tyrants, not so much.

  

Profound Moments from Visiting Countries for the First Time

 

The sky at 1am in Bodo, Norway.

On this trip I traveled to  or through eight countries. Three are my favorite destinations in the world: France, Germany and Italy. Two I just passed through: Turkey and Sweden. Three I visited for the first time: Denmark, Norway and the Vatican. In each of the countries I was in for the first time, I had an experience that only being in that place could give me. 

In Bodo, Norway, I was above the Arctic Circle.  At 1am, when the sun is due north in the northern hemisphere during Daylight Savings Time, I was walking around Bodo. I took the picture above of the cloudy sky with the sun shining in from due north.  I have known this to be true since I first understood Earth's orbit, but seeing it made me irrationally happy.  The sun really was visible due north!  

In Denmark my friend Cliff and I visited Panzer Museum East southwest of Copenhagen.  On the way to Denmark a few days before, we visited Deutsches PanzerMuseum north of Hannover.  That museum, like most military museum, celebrates the weapons of that country. The museum in Denmark does not. The collection of hundreds of tanks, trucks, armored vehicles, missiles, aircraft, cannon, medical equipment, engines, radar systems and other equipment is Soviet-made. 

The museum is designed to be a warning: If the Soviets had invaded Western Europe, these vehicles would have been attacking our country. In a chilling update of the collection, the vehicles that Putin's Russia is using to invade Ukraine are tagged in the display. Nowhere in the museum is any vehicle or equipment ever used by the Army of Denmark.

Also in Denmark, I learned about very different burial practices common in both Denmark and Germany.  Headstones and burial plots are rented for 25 or 50 years.  Then someone gets the space.  I wrote about that here.

The third country I visited was the Vatican.  Like Monaco, San Marino, Andorra, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, it is a city state, a member of the United Nations with its own government, but the size of a city.  Over the past fifteen hundred years the Vatican has had vastly different levels of power. Its current status as an independent state was granted by the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in 1931.  

Before visiting the Vatican, I read a lot about the Catholic Church in Germany. Before and during the trip I was The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler  by David I. Kertzer.  The book is based on Vatican archives opened in 2020 that detail long-hidden history of Pope XII with Hitler and Mussolini.  

I took a train to the Vatican and rode a bike to  St. Peters Square. I walked into the vast plaza and was overwhelmed with sadness.  'To keep this you let all the Jews die,' was what I thought as I walked looking up at the statues and the fountain. Everything about the place screamed temporal power. This was a place of riches and political influence.  

I left and went back to Rome, which was another revelation for me. No amount of reading or maps prepared me for how small the area was that encompassed the Palatine Hill, the Colosseum, the Capital, markets, baths, temples, circuses, all in a relatively small space.  

Travel to a new place is its own reward.