I’m in quarantine after visiting Croatia – I won’t regret a minute of it
Day Three: I wake again in the house with the red cross painted on the door. There is a silence inside – a sense, again, of a gloom descending, though the sky outside is bright. I press my face to the window pane; look at the people passing on the pavement below, watching them go about their day, unfettered, in the soft sunlight of an August morning. But I feel remote from them, removed, trapped inside my own little world of four walls. A faint spray spritzes the glass. Is that a hint of rain outside – or my own salty tears within?
OK, so sarcasm is probably a cheap way to begin an article - lowest form of wit, and all that. But I am indeed spending this pleasantly warm late-summer Monday in quarantine – and I am struggling to summon up much regret about it. Actually, scratch that previous line – I cannot conjure any regret at all. Not an ounce, or whatever unit it is in which regret is weighed and measured. A kilo of regret, sir? Half a pound? No thanks, I’m good.
I know that this isn’t the expected stance at the moment. That the narrative demanded by the good British people is one of lowered-head penitence, of public apology; a stroll in the streets (metaphorically, of course, because street-strolling is off the menu for me for right now) in sackcloth and ashes. Where are the monks who whipped the bare-footed Henry II all the way to Canterbury in 1174, in contrition for the murder of Thomas Becket? Can we drag them out of retirement, summon their ghosts? They’ve work to do.
Sorry – sarcasm again. But no, I am not repentant. I am just back from Croatia, and a delightful week of rest and recuperation that has been very good for the soul. Up until March, I had left this country at least once a month for the last four years, mostly on assignment. The near-half-year interruption to this has been the longest period without international travel in my career. But even though, in the grand scheme of things, five months is not forever, I had forgotten the joy – and the energising effect – of a change of scenery. Croatia is a fine country. Even in the darkness of 2020, it shines as a destination.
I made a mistake, of course. I booked the holiday a fortnight ago today, waiting until we were within a week of our intended departure date to pick a place in the sun – in the hope that, by leaving the decision to the last minute, we would not be caught out by a change in Foreign and Commonwealth Office advice on whether trips to the country in question were formally permitted, or a ruling that we would need to isolate on return.
And I got it wrong. I ran through the shrinking list of options – France was about to fall, Spain already had; Portugal had not yet returned to the Covid Good Boy Club – and assessed each for viability. I didn’t like the entry requirements for Greece (where a positive test for anyone on your flight may mean quarantine for everyone on the plane), but Croatia wanted nothing more onerous than a passenger locator form stating where we would be staying, and for how long. I checked the country’s rolling infection rates, decided they were low enough (at time of booking) for it to remain on the FCO safe list – and pressed the button.
Things changed within 48 hours of our arrival – first, via flutterings on social media that Croatia’s travel corridor would be the next to be closed off, then with increasingly solid news reports, and finally with Thursday’s announcement that quarantine would be brought in for passengers on flights from Croatian airports landing in the UK any later than 4am on Saturday. Then came the hubbub that has become a regular facet of this odd summer: talk of tourists rushing to make it home before the drawbridge rose, and of the supposed 20,000 Britons out in Croatia heading frantically online to secure flights that would have them out of Dubrovnik or Split before the clock struck Quarantine Midnight.
The conversation between me and my wife was brief. We would not be joining any premature exodus. We had known this might happen, and had planned accordingly. We are both in the fortunate position that – currently – we can work from home. We had left a two-week buffer to the Monday our son is due to be back at school. We had “done this already” – March and April were effectively two months of quarantine. We live in an era where – thanks to Zoom calls, supermarket home deliveries and restaurant takeaways – 14 days of self-isolation is a less attritional procedure than at any prior point in human history. We would enjoy the rest of our intended time away without worry, and deal with the repercussions on return. If one does the “crime”, then one does the time – and all that.
So there we are. In one sense, I have no problem with having to squirrel myself away, and will, obviously, comply with this quarantine necessity. That is the responsible thing to do.
But then, we also travelled responsibly – wearing face-masks from the moment of getting into the taxi to the airport to the point of clambering into our hire car in Pula almost six hours later (not a pleasant process, but scarcely an ordeal) – and social-distancing where relevant. We checked into a villa – a single unit of accommodation, with nothing around it for 50 metres in every direction but olive groves and open space – in Valica, an Istrian village of such meagre size and head-count that you can barely identify it on the map. We were far more removed from anything and everything around us than I am here, as I type this, in east London – as a city that has been a pandemic hotspot swirls all around us.
And it is here in which I have a problem with the sending of Croatia to the naughty step – a demotion at which the country can feel especially maligned. True, a surge in Covid cases, largely in the capital Zagreb, has seen its infection rate hit a level (39.3 cases per 100,000 people over the last seven days) deemed unacceptable by the UK government. But its response to the pandemic has been careful, and “successful” – to date, “only” 171 of its citizens have died of the disease. This in a country of 22,000 square miles yet only four million inhabitants, which has one of Europe’s lowest population densities.
Quite why it should be lectured by a United Kingdom which has – however the government is reducing the figures this week – suffered more than 40,000 confirmed deaths is a mystery to all but those in Whitehall. And it has said as much. “When we heard the UK government’s decision, we thought ‘this is not fair’,” the country’s Secretary of the Ministry of Tourism Frano Matusic commented at the weekend. “Because Croatia is really a safe destination.”
He’s right. I saw this for myself last week. Face coverings were almost ubiquitous in shops, beaches were spaced out, restaurants had moved their seating out onto terraces – with plenty of room between tables, and bottles of hand-sanitiser at every door. When I posted a photo of the view from my villa on arrival, I was met with replies which said that Croatia has been lackadaisical and complacent in its battle with the virus. I saw no such thing. In the restaurant where we ate on Friday evening, the staff were as offended and baffled by the UK ruling as they were conscientious and cautious in serving their guests.
These brickbats do real damage to a country’s reputation. Croatia will now be tarred as one of the Covid Cluster until this virus has run its course. And at the root of this – in this example – is the use of the bluntest of instruments to steer a course of action. I do not have an issue with the UK government taking a wary approach to who crosses its borders in the midst of a global pandemic. This is sensible and pragmatic. But a two-week window of quarantine is a badly-carved stone axe-head, smashed onto a boulder to squash a bug. Caveman could be forgiven his use of such rudimentary tools. The powers that be in a European democracy in the technologically advanced 21st century should not.
But then, anything more intuitive than a lump of rock hammered down from above is clearly beyond a government whose reaction to 2020’s challenges seems to be a dumb reliance on dubious algorithms and contracts for mates’ start-ups.
There is no nuance to its travel policy, or knowledge – merely a blank gawping at broad statistics. Just as the Canary and Balearic Islands have been damned by a rise in cases in Catalonia, so Istria has been put to the sword by an infection spike in Zagreb. Where we were staying was directly below the border with Slovenia (we could see Portoroz on the shore from the top of the hill) – a country that is currently exempt from FCO concerns. Had we picked a villa five or so miles to the north, we wouldn’t have been “in danger”. Had we left the villa we did pick 24 hours earlier, we wouldn’t now be deemed a danger to others. What nonsense.
Where is the “world-beating” track-and-trace system that we have been promised over and over? Where is the test-on-arrival system that other countries have implemented without fuss or difficulty. If “little” Iceland can manage it, why not the United Kingdom?
So what to do? If you’re me, you’re staying in for two weeks. If you’re you (and if you’re reading this, you probably are), and you are considering a holiday overseas in the next few months, there is no reason to be put off by the current quarantine knee-jerkism. Airports are quiet, bargains available (not least in a Portugal now back in favour), and if you book late, monitor infection rates and choose with a touch more foresight than I did, then a good swathe of Europe is still open, and safely. And if official censure does come, and quarantine looms anyway, you can “join” me at the window. The view isn’t too bad.
