Escape

Travel isn’t as easy at it once was – remember when the thing preventing you from doing it was as basic (in the Millenial sense) as a lack of money? One of the legacies of the pandemic has been government requirements for everyday activities becoming arduous, complicated and apt to change very quickly without notice. In the days leading up to my intended flight to Melbourne, I actually became quite anxious about the whole scenario.

And so, after consuming dire news stories about lengthy queues at our overloaded airports, and worried about delays caused by endless health scans and vaccination checks, I got up at dawn and arrived at Perth airport three hours before my 10.30am flight.

It was not a heaving scene of chaos. It was completely deserted, apart from the occasional FIFO worker in hi-vis wandering in for his flight back to a mine site. There was one single Virgin attendant, who was so bored that she leapt at the chance to check my bags for me.

Upstairs at the security check there was not only no queue, there were no other passengers. Far from wanting to check my temperature or my vaccination status, they barely wanted to check my bags. All of the enhanced anti-terrorism rigmarole of removing belts and shoes and bottles of liquid seems to have been abandoned. As such, twenty minutes after I arrived at the airport I was sitting in a cafe at the boarding gate eating breakfast.

Several hours later I landed at Melbourne airport, and discovered where all of those stories about queues and chaos had come from. The airport was like a train station in Calcutta, with people crammed into every corner, sitting in the corridors, queuing for security checkpoints and toilets and vending machines. It seems as if, after attaining the dubious honour of being the Most Locked Down City in the World, Melburnians are all desperate to be somewhere else.

Well, not Perth, obviously; no one is that desperate, and we wouldn’t let them in even if they were. But there’s a whole other world out there.