Days after a two-week tour through the island province of Hainan – dubbed China’s Hawaii – Nicole Chan received a notice from the local government that no tourists in the country wanted to see the pandemic.
On August 3, a day after officials reported 11 cases of Covid-19 in Sanya, a city of more than a million people in Hainan, Ms. Chan was identified by authorities as being at risk of contracting the disease. because she was in the area that day. She was required to be quarantined immediately for a three-day monitoring period and undergo two coronavirus tests.
After the quarantine period expired and the test result was negative, Ms. Chan, a freelance videographer, was informed that she was not allowed to go to the airport because she had been to Sanya. It took another 10 days, 10 canceled flights and more than a dozen negative test results before she was allowed to leave the island and fly back to Shanghai, where she now lives.
With China’s borders still closed, some people have turned to domestic travel to find relief from the mass inspections, mass quarantines and widespread closures that have become commonplace. in cities across the country. But China’s commitment to ensuring zero Covid-19 cases in its population of 1.4 billion means that even domestic tourists run the risk of going to the wrong place, at the wrong time, and getting sick. stuck there.
“It’s like playing Russian roulette with tourism,” said Ms. Chan. “A lot of it is out of your hands and out of your control.”
Last month, during the peak of the summer tourist season, China closed popular tourist destinations in Hainan, Tibet and Xinjiang following outbreaks of the disease in these areas. stranded tens of thousands of tourists. In some cases, travelers have to pay for their own hotel quarantine. In Sanya, the government asked hotels to offer 50% discounts for stranded guests.
China’s tough approach of doing whatever it takes to contain Covid-19 – try raw fish in the port city of Xiamen, among countless other pandemic protocols – have taken a toll on the economy and weighed on people’s psyche.
Travel offers little escape.
Chinese citizens are not allowed to go abroad for “non-essential” trips. Traveling within the country involves navigating a maze of ever-changing quarantine rules and changing testing requirements by region — and that’s the best-case scenario.
In Sanya, the local government suspended local public transport and halted rail ticket sales as part of a citywide lockdown on August 6. A day later, all flights departures from Sanya were cancelled.
Although flights have been canceled for at least a week, crowds gathered at the airport according to local media. Video of angry tourists chanting “Go home, go home, we go home!” quickly spread on the internet.
Nearby places like Haikou, the capital of Hainan province, and Wanning, a popular surfing spot, also closed to limit the spread of the virus.
Michelle Chen, a 30-year-old engineer, went to Sanya for a five-day beach vacation with her husband. This is the first trip she has gone on in two years, a getaway after two months of lockdown in Shanghai. She found the Sanya experience “surreal,” she said.
One day, people are frolicking on the beach in bikinis, and the next time they’re trying to run away with their luggage – only to encounter a police blockade on the highway.
Ms. Chen and her husband were stuck in Sanya for another week, unable to leave their hotel room until they secured seats on a flight chartered by the Sanya government on August 13. Do you want to travel again for fun?
“I might not travel anymore for a year unless I go back to my hometown or go on a business trip,” she said. “I really wouldn’t dare travel in the future without a good reason.”
Other popular tourist attractions were also locked down after reporting confirmed Covid-19 cases. When Tibet reported 22 cases on August 8, the first positive results in more than two years, local authorities locked down several popular stops in the area and closed several tourist attractions.
As of Tuesday, more than 4,700 tourists were stranded in Tibet.
Xinjiang, a top resort destination for outdoor enthusiasts in northwest China, faces similar challenges, with thousands of tourists banned from leaving the region following the outbreak. recent epidemic. According to an official in Ili province, this group includes not only people who have tested positive for Covid-19, but also their close relatives, close contacts and people in medium and high risk areas.
The severity and duration of the lockdowns have made domestic travel less attractive. In the first six months of this year, the number of domestic tourists in China was 22 percent off year-on-year, and tourism revenue fell 28% year-on-year, according to the country’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
For Zhu Yan, who owns a 16-room inn by Lake Qionghai, a scenic destination in Xichang, a city in southwestern China’s Sichuan province, the tourist business has taken a turn for the worse. as the pandemic drags on. In 2020 and 2021, she said, tourists return quickly even after the closure, with most people choosing to travel within their province.
But this year, private companies and public organizations are asking employees not to leave the city where they live for fear of exposure to Covid-19 and being stuck somewhere else, said Zhu, 40. know.
“This year, no one played, even on holidays. Nobody,” she said, for about the first half of this year. She said business activity has picked up slightly in recent weeks.
The headaches when traveling in China during the pandemic are related to the difficulties not only with leaving an outbreak place but also with returning home.
Ms. Chan, who was stranded in Hainan, came to the island to work. Three colleagues from Beijing who accompanied her had to stay because they were told that the capital had not yet allowed them to return.
When Ms. Chan finally caught a flight back to Shanghai on Tuesday, she said her plane remained on the tarmac for two hours as medical professionals boarded. It took another three hours before she arrived at a quarantine hotel, where the travelers finally received some food, and workers went to their rooms to perform PCR tests.
On Wednesday, Ms. Chan left the hotel expecting to begin a three-day home quarantine period, as required by the city. Instead, she was told by a neighborhood official that she would have to quarantine for a full seven days, she said. By the time she arrived at her apartment, it had been 37 hours since she had left Hainan — usually a two-and-a-half-hour flight from Shanghai, she said.
So why did she travel to Hainan in the first place?
Ms. Chan, 27, said she was there to shoot a promotional video for tourism in Hainan, an irony that kept her from getting lost.
“Since Covid started in 2020, I have implemented very limited travel within China,” she said. “This experience makes it even less likely. There is too much risk.”
Claire Fu contribution research.
