No one said travel would be easy

I completely forgot to write my blog yesterday because I was so distracted. We are actually leaving the country tomorrow for the first time in nearly two years and not only is it more complicated than it used to be, but I’m really out of practice. I can’t quite remember how international travel is done. What do you pack and what do you leave behind? How do you behave in someone else’s country? How do you say “Do I need to wear a mask?” in Italian?

The rules change all the time, but at the moment British people travelling to Italy have to provide proof of a negative Covid test, fill in a Passenger Locator Form and arrange to take a Covid test two days after we return home. I was very nervous about taking the Covid test before flying – what would happen if it came back positive? I suppose we wouldn’t be leaving the house, let alone getting on a plane. Luckily, we seem to be disease-free, so it’s all looking good for tomorrow.

All this does seem like a lot of faffing about, but looked at objectively, it’s not really that much extra to organise. When I think of some of the visa applications I’ve filled in, a mere Passenger Locator Form and a Covid test are nothing. For Uzbekistan, not only did we have pages and pages of application form to complete, but we also had to copy every single page of our passports and send the lot off for inspection. I bet they made paper aeorplanes out of them.

For the Russian one, we had to list every country we had visited in the past 10 years, which was quite a challenge for me, but for my husband, who often travelled on business, it was just about impossible. In fact, he ran out of room on the form and decided to attach an Excel spreadsheet containing all the extra information. I can’t imagine they were grateful. Then of course there was the trip to the Russian visa office in London to be fingerprinted. It all felt very Cold War and, to be honest, I quite enjoyed it.

Then there was the Chinese visa application, which I recall asking for endless details about my life, including what my father did for a living, as well as location details for every day we were there. We couldn’t apply for the visa too soon or too late – too far in advance and it might expire before our trip began, but if we left it too late the visa might not arrive in time for us to travel. I don’t think the Chinese invented bureaucracy, but they’ve certainly taken it to impressive heights.

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In the end, we got all the visas we needed and happily headed off to exotic locations, so why am I so unsure that we’ll actually be in Italy this time tomorrow? I suppose we’re living in uncertain times.  With any luck, I won’t be able to write my blog next Friday because I’ll be exploring the caves around Matera in Puglia, southern Italy. I’m sure it’ll be worth any amount of paperwork.