There is an Opportunity this Spring to Go Back in Time

I knew when the possible implications of the rapidly spreading coronavirus back in February became clear, that I didn’t want this blog to become a personal outlet for the frustrations resulting from a traveler whose wings have been clipped. Fortunately Northern Italy where I live and work is filled with extraordinary cultural and natural destinations which the archives bear witness to. However as we were placed in another round of lockdowns, despite everything health coordinators have learned about how lockdowns are absolutely not the answer to reducing COVID-19 related deaths in a society, I have had enough mental musings to merit updating the blog for the first time since I visited Lago di Garda in September.

I’m planning travels again. This spring I’m going to Jordan, then to Morocco, and in July the wife and I are planning a 12-day holiday in Sri Lanka which is maybe the most exciting of all. I’ve never really taken a moment to learn about Sri Lanka, so planning that particular trip was really good for my mental health. Planning trips has been shown by studies at Cornell as a good way to relieve quarantine related stress, as it allows you a glimpse, a short taste, of a place long before you get there while simultaneously giving you a sense of control over the future and a reason to be hopeful. Morocco was somewhere I had imagined myself visiting in January and February of this year, but came here to Italy instead. My itinerary is still here, tucked away in my Microsoft Word folder, and I’m excited to use it again. I hope to move in a zigzag pattern, starting in Tangier, zigging over to Tetouan, Chefchaouen, before zagging southwest to Fez, and Mekness. If I have time, I shall zig once more, to Ifrane in the Atlas Mountains, and once more to the Atlantic for Rabat.

My wife said the most beautiful thing about me and my insatiable hunger for long-term traveling, that she “wants to miss me, to see and read the world as I see it, before one day coming home and seeing your shoes in front of the door.” We believe that our passions of traveling and of horses, anchor us to our private realities, and go a long way towards helping us understand why we decided to get married in the first place.

I must say that Morocco in this unique period in history has several things that attract me to it. First, is that it is my preferred wrench to throw into the forever lockdowners’ propaganda, that even at the height of the African first wave, they’ve never registered more than 100 deaths in a day, even thought they are a country famous around the world for having the tightest, most confusing city streets you could ever hope to find. Secondly, with most casual or semi-adventurous vacationers certainly limiting their holiday destinations to their own countries, I suspect there will be a small window of opportunity to see Morocco in a more natural setting, without worrying about constantly sharing that half-bemused, half-irritated exchange of eyes when a white traveler sees another white traveler in a country where nobody looks like you.

I’m sure there will be tons of problems with the vaccines, as they are being rolled out into the least-ideal viral landscape you could imagine. COVID-19 across different countries are now mutating many times over due to the long, continuous, slow spreading from person to person. Some countries are developing a “COVID-20” which has mutated 6 separate times to defend itself against different antibodies, and combined with the number of people who would prefer to let their own immune system defend themselves wanting to pass on the vaccine, and the number of side effects that inevitably occurs with such things, I suspect that “the jab” will be only the first would what might have to be a “jab-cross-hook-uppercut” combination of pharmaceuticals before governments finally allow life to return to normal. At this point if I need to stick a COVID-19 vaccine passport next to my Yellow Fever passport, that’s fine with me, but I have no illusions that there are people in the fields of journalism, medicine, and politics, who have allowed this virus to consume their entire identify, and as a result advocate for social distancing and lockdowns until the disease is eradicated.

There is a small window of time after these vaccines where in order to save flounder economies, governments will open up, and I am going to travel with all my might, but I am expecting more lockdowns after the summer, as COVID-19/20/201 becomes another seasonal coronavirus we have to plan for every time the temperatures fall.