Very late on. In March I had planned a multi-country trip to Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, booking everything back in January. Iran was the first to go, my flights there being cancelled at the end of February. No probs I thought, I still had the other three, and on March 15th I flew into Budapest with a few hours stopover before my flight to Nur-Sultan, intending to fly back to London from Bishkek in a month’s time. As recently as the 12th I’d met up with a couple of friends and the three of us had a right laugh about all this panic, remembering the non-event of swine flu (in the UK at least) and that we’d have all forgotten this by April.
Gate opens so I board the queue, have one last check of my phone before putting it on flight mode and find out that Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are closing their borders that evening. The flight I’m nine minutes away from boarding may or may not arrive in time for me to be let into the country, but even if I am then christ knows how I’m meant to get out. I ask at the gate and they’re not aware of any border closure and confirm the flight’s definitely departing. I look at the queue and everyone in it has a Kazakhstan passport except me, so presumably they’ll be ok but I could get stuck. As I watch the queue board I feel the sinking realisation that this huge trip I had planned isn’t going to happen after all, and sit there feeling all sorts of helpless as the gate closes and the flight departs. So, erm, can I go back to London? Or at least into Arrivals? Or is my new life akin to Tom Hanks in The Terminal?
I try going back into Arrivals but the immigration officer gets rather concerned at a recent stamp for Lebanon in my passport (from January 2020) and questions me a bit including if I’ve ever been to Iran. He lets me through (just before Hungary themselves shut their borders) and as it’s a Sunday the terminal’s packed full of weekenders trying to get home, so I decide to sod that for a game of soldiers and stay in Budapest for a while, at one point wondering if I should just start learning Hungarian and get a job here until it’s all over.
First accommodation I find has a sign saying they’re not accepting travellers from China, Italy, Iran or the United Kingdom. I show my Irish passport and I’m allowed to stay there. It’s a cheap £5 hostel with €1 pints and I enjoy an evening with travellers from Taiwan, Croatia and Germany all laughing about the mess we’re in and how we’ll get home. Luckily Budapest is in a 22 degree heatwave so I spend a lot of time lazing in empty parks and getting unseasonably tanned for that time of year, and on hearing from London friends about the panic buying, I pop into a random supermarket and see that Hungarians thankfully aren’t following suit and there’s dozens of toilet roll on the shelves. By the 17th my work closes, as is gradually Hungary with restaurants limiting their hours and hotels closing down, and I watch as the tourists deplete each day and everything gets oddly quiet.
The following weekend I’m back at the ghost town that is now Budapest Airport and out of the 30 flights listed on the departure screen, four are still running - Doha, Luxembourg, Frankfurt and, oddly enough, Edinburgh. It’s the latter I get and there’s about a dozen of us on the flight so plenty of room to distance. Immigration is a breeze - no questions, no temperature checks, just straight through into a weirdly empty arrivals, and I frantically go online to see how to get home to London without paying a three figure sum. Through a combination of last-minute advance tickets it costs me about £30 instead, and via Manchester/Liverpool I’m back home in London on the evening lockdown is announced. Walking home past shuttered shops and cafes it feels like I’ve been gone an utter lifetime.
TLDR - Sunday 15th March, Budapest Airport.
