Good day from Christchurch, New Zealand! TJ here, and our TIME field team of 6 (4 researchers and 2 field guides) are currently on Day 2 of our mandatory 14-day Managed Isolation Quarantine (MIQ) in New Zealand. At this point in time, I’m writing this blog post from my (very spacious) hotel room at the Distinction Hotel in downtown Christchurch. Although travelling to Antarctica is not a standard destination route in general, the many new Covid-19-related regulations that we have to abide by this year make this experience even more unique!
Before we arrived in to New Zealand, we had to further undergo several days of pre-travel quarantine in San Francisco (7 days for international participants, 4 days for US-based participants). We were all housed at the Grand Hyatt adjacent to SFO Airport--I considered this arrangement to be quite a significant upgrade to my rather small room in Cambridge! During our stay in San Francisco, on-site staff from USAP’s travel department made sure we were kept well-fed, active, and prepared for our onward travel. A massive thank you to Kaneen, Laura, Janessa, and the rest of the team for managing such a complex itinerary!
Kaneen, Laura, and Janessa from USAP Travel ensured that we were able to travel from SFO to New Zealand--they even escorted us all the way to the boarding gate!
The 14-day MIQ is mandatory for anyone entering New Zealand, and we are so fortunate to be allowed to enter the country when immigration has been heavily regulated as part of the country’s Covid-19 prevention measures! All USAP participants needed to apply in advance for a special “Antarctic Travellers” visa from the New Zealand government which is then attached to official permission to enter the country. When we arrived in to Christchurch (via a chartered flight from SFO!), we were ushered onto shuttle buses that took us to our quarantine hotels. This was all arranged by the New Zealand authorities, and we were not even sure where we were going until we arrived right in front of the Distinction! We were welcomed by not only the hotel staff, but also military staff from the New Zealand Defence Force. It was pretty obvious that New Zealand takes Covid-19 prevention measures very seriously!
Check-in at SFO--our flight was chartered exclusively for our ~150 person large cohort
Life in quarantine is very comfortable (in my opinion, but I am sure the opinions vary widely)! Although we are confined to our rooms, we are allowed a fixed amount of supervised outdoor time, which basically involves walking around a fenced-off portion of sidewalk socially-distanced from each other. In our rooms, we pre-book our meals from a weekly menu, and they magically show up at our door, three times a day. Although this description sounds eerily like the daily schedule inside a prison, I assure you, we are being treated very well.
We're given lots of reading material about our MIQ, including a daily 'gazette' with doodling activities to help while away the time. I have already completed today's Sudoku puzzles!
But, you might ask, how we are keeping our sanity in check from being locked in a room for multiple days on end? Although everyone has their own ways of addressing this situation, I can offer a few tips of my own:
Rearrange the room to make it ‘yours’: For me, this involved putting away items that I wasn’t ever going to use such as the coffee machine (I am a tea-only person!) and moving clothes and items into the drawers, just like back at ‘home’. I also moved the work table closer to the window to maximise sunlight, and rearranged the armchairs to an after-work “reading corner”.
Set a schedule that partitions work and play: Every researcher has a never-ending to-do list, and quarantine presents a perfect opportunity to finally tackle this list. I work my regular hours as if I were at a home office (thanks to Covid, everyone can relate to this), and have set times every day when I ‘leave’ work (i.e. I stop sitting at the table in front of the laptop. I then can enjoy the rest of the day with some down time!
Have a variety of downtime activities: Although I am definitely not regretting bringing my Switch with me or having a Netflix subscription, there are many other things to do that don’t involve sitting in front of a TV all day! Having a daily exercise routine, learning a language on Duolingo, and catching up with friends and family, all help me fill up my free time with productive activities.
Home (away from home) for the next two weeks, with a nice view of Christchurch Central City
I definitely don’t have it all figured out--I still end up doing a lot of mindless pacing around the room, and perhaps watch too much TV (Squid Game--understandable, right?). But, I still have two more weeks to make the most of my MIQ experience, before we finally deploy to Antarctica!
Dinner’s just arrived, with a knock on the door. Signing off!
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