The Last Hoorah

It’s day 23 of Peruvian lockdown. We are leaving tomorrow on a flight to Melbourne. We’re so grateful to be coming home, but also feeling a million other emotions as this draws to a close this chapter of our travels.

I’ll reflect a little on strategies we’ve used to keep our heads above water through lockdown, in case there’s anything that resonates with you and you want to explore:

• Yoga – our daily Yoga with Adriene (YouTube channel) sessions have been a blessing. More than anything, I feel like Adriene’s taught me patience and how to enjoy the journey, not just the destination.
• Meditation and breathing exercises – a big help to manage anxiety. I recommend Sam Harris’ “Waking Up” app, which is currently free, and stepping through the introduction course.
• Creativity and learning new skills – Dan has been playing up a storm on the ukulele, and I’ve found working on Australia, Where Are You: The Musical (AWAY) very therapeutic. I think having projects really helps you make the most of time, in circumstances where you can’t spend it in the way you thought you would.
• Exercise – we can’t go outside for exercise here, so it’s been so much fun to build up a sweat in the lounge room with resistance bands, or Joe Wicks’ (YouTube channel) HIIT workouts.
• Games – our repertoire is 500 and Yaniv, both of which can be played by two or more people. We also took up Monopoly when we found a Peru version in our latest Airbnb.
• Disconnecting – we find ourselves endlessly scrolling social media and the news (especially when we were desperate for any update about options to get home). We found it helpful to put in place reasonable barriers so limit the frequency at which we could scroll these updates, giving us a disconnection break in between.
• Intellectual stimulation – I’ve enjoyed keeping up my Spanish study, then reinforcing by watching all TV with Spanish subtitles (even when audio is Spanish!). I’ve also discovered the EDX app which lets you register for a whole lot of short-form uni courses on a range of subjects. I’m looking forward to getting my teeth stuck into “Data Science Ethics”.

And, of course, we’re enormously grateful to the family and friends who have supported us with messages and calls. And also to Jack and Heather whose amazing company made the first two weeks sail by.

I’m amazed that despite the strictness of the lockdown here, the case numbers haven’t stagnated or dropped as expected. So the President keeps announcing new measures – who can go out in a particular day is allocated by gender, and no one can go out on Sunday. This week, everything will be closed on Thursday and Friday too, for Easter. The line to get into the supermarket (at least on ladies days) stretches for hundreds and hundreds of metres (snaking around the entire block and then lapping itself), and can take an hour to wait through. I’m glad to be leaving this behind. I absolutely appreciate that I’m not going back to the same Australia we left, but I’d just be so grateful to go outside for a proper walk.

But first, we’ll need to get through the 14 days of mandatory quarantine in a Melbourne hotel room, and then we can make our way to Brisbane somehow. I wonder how long Dan will keep his glorious quarantine moustache going for…

VRPS

[Lima]