Trapped in Paradise

The 747 banked to the left and made its approach to Auckland Airport. It was early morning and the Tasman Sea glistened like a steel guitar below. It was December 1995 and a few hours earlier I was deep in sleep when I crossed the equator for the first time.

The quarter acre sections with weatherboard houses and tin roofs were laid out before me and I could see cars and buses wriggle their way around the 52 volcanoes that pimple the city.

To be honest, I fell in love with the country before I even landed. I was 30 and I had been hanging out with Kiwis since I moved to London at the age of 22. London was a melting pot, full of all nationalities, but particularly ones from the older colonies. I met Canadians, Australians and lots of people from the Indian Sub-continent. But I look back now and I was always drawn towards New Zealanders. They seemed to have so much in common with the Irish. A feeling of being over shadowed by a bigger neighbour, a need to be cooler than the rest and a work hard, party harder attitude.

I moved to Luxembourg in 1993 and fell in with the Kiwi crowd there. That’s when I first saw a guy open a beer bottle with his eye socket and heard stories of this mystical land of snow-capped mountains and sun kissed beaches. A good mate of mine was from Christchurch and he invited me to his place for Christmas dinner. That was the start of a lifelong love affair that saw me visit here about five times before I talked my Kiwi born wife into moving here.

Now it seems I’m trapped here for the foreseeable future, whether I like it or not.

Covid 19 is a global pandemic and many people are in worse position than me, of course. 350,000 people are dead, for example. And if I was going to be trapped in any country, then New Zealand would be the obvious choice. It is the country I want to live in but it’s also the one that has handled this epidemic best. It’s not a competition of course, but I can now visit the pub and that’s the main measure of success in my mind.

Every time you see somebody mention New Zealand’s success in dealing with the virus, you’ll see lots of ‘below the line’ comments about how this is down to the remoteness of the place and the lack of population density. Those people obviously don’t know how many daily flights were coming in here from China, or how many people are crammed into shared homes in Auckland.

The real reason the country did well is because they closed the borders down early in the process and focussed on tracking down the contacts of any cases that were here. This worked but the obvious conclusion is that when New Zealand is happy that they have eliminated the virus, the borders can’t reopen until the rest of the world eliminates the virus or a vaccine is found. The vaccine won’t be ready for at least two years and if you look at the way some countries are dealing with things, it will be a long time before this malevolent infection is banished from the world.

There is talk about flights from here to Australia restarting in the near future. They also seem to be getting the virus under control and negotiations about a “double bubble” are taking place. This would come as a great relief to Kiwis who see Australia as their bolt hole if things aren’t going well here. It’s very similar to the relationship Irish people have with Britain. We slag it off constantly, but many of us have happy memories of living there.

I’d love to visit Australia too. I miss a lot of things about Melbourne and my sister lives in Sydney. So, if Australia was the only place I could visit for the next couple of years, I could find plenty to do. They might even open the Pacific Islands as they are also close to being virus free and New Zealand has a special relationship with Samoa and Tonga in particular. Thousands of their citizens live here and are desperate to visit relatives.

But I think it will be a long time before I get to visit Ireland or anywhere else in Europe soon. The Tories are making such a mess of things that you would swear they were in competition with the Americans for most kills. And if the Brits are still a mess, then Ireland will be collaterally damaged.

So, I’m guessing I will be stuck here in paradise for at least two years. That will be the longest time I have ever spent away from Ireland. It’s not as though I’m itching to go back, but knowing you can’t is tough to deal with.

Thankfully, while I’m stuck here I can enjoy being in what is called “Level 2”. Lockdown goes up to Level 4 (which we were in two weeks ago) when everything apart from Supermarkets and Pharmacies were shut. In Level 2, the schools have reopened, which is a huge relief as I was a complete failure as a home teacher. I can now go into the office or work from home as much as I like. Pubs and restaurants are open, at least if you’re willing to sign in and out. Traffic is not too bad if I want to drive to work and best off all, you can book a hotel 3 days before you leave, even when it’s a bank holiday weekend.

I’d happily stay in level 2 forever, although it is destroying the tourist industry. The government is encouraging us locals to fill the gap and hopefully that will give me the chance to see parts of this beautiful country that I haven’t seen before. That will have to do until the 747 is banking right again on its way out of Auckland.