We dodged hotel quarantine by the skin of our teeth, but it was worth the stress to see our son
I knew all the effort was worth it when we walked through customs and out into the arrivals hall in Mexico City airport on July 16. There was William, our youngest son, who came out to Mexico City in 2016 to train to teach English. He met a Mexican woman and we’ve known for three years now that he isn’t coming back.
My wife grabbed him in the way only a mother really can, and we all started crying, not least at the thought of one of our other sons and his children beyond our reach for what seems like forever in Hanoi, Vietnam. There they are yet again locked down in that special groundhog-day experience only the zero Covid nations really excel at after 16 months of honing their skills at turning life into one barely worth living.
The other reason I know it was worth it was because three of my neighbours have been widowed in the last eight months, none from Covid. One of their husbands died while we were in Mexico, the news arriving halfway through the trip. All three were within a few years either side of our ages. Tends to sharpen one’s focus.
Entering Mexico was the easiest part of the trip. The weeks of preparations were all about how to get back into Britain. Mexico has no entry requirements apart from a valid passport, a health declaration, and a completed immigration form.
The trip’s cost was inflated by around ￡650 to pay for all the Covid extras (tests, high powered specialized travel insurance, two extra weeks in the airport car park in case we got stuck). I had carefully timed our departure to come the day after one of the government’s three-weekly updates to the traffic light system and to be home in advance of the next one. That turned out to be one of the best decisions I made – although at the time I thought I was being neurotic. Not a bit of it in this insane world.
The family reunion could have been anywhere. The whole point was to see one of the four boys we brought into the world making his way through adulthood while we still can (he’s 31 now). Mexico City is a chaotic and colourful place with beautiful parks, churches, museums, and a vibrant street life. He showed us around using his now fluent Spanish (an astonishing feat for someone who struggled with languages at school) and took us to his Spanish family’s home in the beautiful old city of Querétaro to the north, where we were greeted as part of the clan.
It's a mark of a country where most of the population has low expectations of its government that Mexicans have resorted to their own precautions. Don’t ever complain about wearing masks again. In Mexico mask-wearing has been turned into a fetish.
In the streets there is barely a person in sight without a virus and bacteria-laden limp rag (called a cubrebocas ‘mouth covering’) slapped over their mouths, even in wide open national parks with only a handful of visitors, even though there is no national law to that effect.
You’re sluiced with hand gel at every shop and your temperature is tested, as well as having to tramp through a puddle of disinfectant in a rubber mat dried off on a filthy rag a few inches further on. If you’re lucky you can be doused in disinfectant spray merely for peering round a church door. A sensational job-creation scheme if nothing else.
In a special variant on taking precautions, many taxi-drivers have taken the trouble to rustle up a bespoke cabin made from a wooden framework covered in polythene sheets. Encased inside this plastic greenhouse in a country where temperatures are easily over 30C in the middle of the day it must be the perfect environment for all sorts of other diseases that love a hot and damp environment. No matter, the holes in the flapping polythene and flaking gaffer tape round the edges make for plenty of healthy ventilation, but also mean that even a virus the size of a tennis ball could find a way in or out.
The social distancing stickers are blithely ignored but are omnipresent. It’s all a bit like exploring the underwater in a wetsuit made of cardboard.
Much of this effort is genuine and sincere. Mexicans are trying to do their best, taking Covid seriously on one hand but also trying to earn a living. This is not a country where the government can afford to print money like it’s going out of fashion and bankroll the longest sabbatical in national history. As a result, much of life is otherwise virtually normal in Mexico because it has to be, though school closures have had a terrible impact on education and many people have taken a devastating hit to their incomes. This is a beautiful and vibrant country, and it has tried hard to cling onto its spirit.
Testing to return home was a nightmare. Since Mexico does not have an easy system of free testing, most of the people at the pharmacy were there because they had Covid symptoms; I don’t think the British government considered this kind of potentially hazardous situation, when it imposed the pre-flight test rules. Thankfully, after a three-hour queue, our tests were negative, although I bitterly resent spending the preceding fortnight worrying about this pre-flight test (with good reason, it turned out, given Mexico’s recent addition to the red list just days after we got home).
This wasn’t the end of the bureaucracy, of course. More tests, health declarations and passenger locator forms awaited on our travels home. Travelling in July 2021 was an allegory of the whole degeneration of government decisions and impositions into a dizzying spiral down Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole that has made everyday life in Britain a torment. Whether you travel or stay at home we’re all victims of something that is steadily unravelling into farce. I don’t resent the measures per se, but I do resent the unpredictability, racketeering, and disorder, which are inexcusable and entirely the government’s fault.
Three days after arriving home, we were still up to our eyes in jet lag when we woke to the news that Mexico was to be added to the red list from Sunday August 8. We read with horror the stories about families devastated to discover at no notice they either had to fly straight back home or face 10 days in the clink at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, paying for the privilege, a racket about to be ratcheted up by several hundred quid a few days later, and shuddered at how close we came.
We now don’t know when we’ll see William again and we’re not going to justify or apologise to anyone for making the trip. We’re lucky we had the money to go when we did, and this son at least lives in a country we could get into at the time of travelling, and even luckier we snuck back into England before the little avenue of pleasure that was Mexico was shut down by Grant Shapps. There are countless other families who are still months and probably years from seeing each other again, and more than a few members of those families who will die from any one of a thousand other causes than Covid before they’ll be allowed to.
