Having spent six weeks at home in Beckenham and another three on my washout in Canada, I finally arrived back in Hong Kong

The journey and its overture of trying to find a PCR testing clinic in Vancouver that would provide me with a certificate of ISO 15189 accreditation was incredibly stressful. Air Canada had been banned on the route the previous week so it was doubly crucial that I had the right paperwork for Hong Kong. I arrived at the airport half a day early for my flight and, though I didn’t actually have anything that said “ISO 15189” on it, my “equivalent” accreditation certificate from British Columbia was enough in the end, though I was filled with anxiety that they’d refuse to board me right until I actually put my luggage on the belt at check-in.

I’m not going to bore you further with the details of my arrival process at HKIA. Of course, having made the same journey last year, I was expecting the four-hour wait for my arrival PCR test. I thought that would be the extent of it, however, and didn’t expect to be shepherded into queue after queue by rude, scornful officials. I mean, I know I have said that Hong Kong is the unfriendliest place I’ve ever experienced but it’s almost as if they were trying as hard as possible to make arriving in Hong Kong a horrible experience that we won’t want to repeat. How dare we have the temerity to want to visit our families overseas? Don’t we I know that’s it’s only FOREIGNERS bringing this disease into Hoing Kong? Before you start, someone has said the latter thing to me, and it’s the impression I get from many of the commenters in the South China Morning Post. It was a huge culture shock after cheery, studiously polite Canada.

I finally managed to get onto my escorted hotel transport at about 12.30pm, more than 6 hours after landing and I reflected ruefully how freewheeling and easy HKIA arrivals were before Covid 19 and the 2019 protests. We’d just hop on the half-hourly bus from the airport. I’ve actually managed plane to home in an hour before.

So about an hour later here I was in my hotel room in Causeway Bay, chosen to be not too inconvenient for our new home in Clearwater Bay, a move which fell through on the day it was supposed to happen. I was bewildered by the copious instruction booklet, exhausted and fractious.

This, then is a diary of my 14 day quarantine. Arrivals direct from the UK have a 21 day quarantine at the moment, the most punitive – I use that word advisedly – in the world and my three week washout in less-risky Canada was planned to exempt me from two weeks of this but HK changed the rules after I booked. It’s still a week less than others I know. I am lucky.