Moving countries during the pandemic
How I managed to move countries during the COVID-19 pandemic
I mentioned a while ago, in an article, how I changed jobs during the pandemic, but one thing that I didn't mention is that I was supposed to relocate from New Zealand to Australia, where my company (Xplor) is based.
The beginning
On March 19th, New Zealand borders close to all but New Zealand citizens and permanent residents, followed by the Australian government on March 20th.
On the 25th of March 2020, New Zealand Announced a level 4 lockdown for the whole country. For those who are not familiar with the New Zealand alert level system, level 4 is a hard lockdown, and only essential services are allowed to open. Not even takeouts were allowed.
That’s how I got stuck in New Zealand. My company offered all support, and the remote onboarding was amazing, as I described in my previous article.
New Zealand moved to a less strict level on 13 May 2020 and removed the national emergency state. A month later, on 8 June 2020, we moved to level 1, which is the less strict level possible here.
After all, New Zealand was not a bad place to be during COVID, we had one of the strictest lockdowns, but it didn’t last as long as in other counties.
Green safe travel zone
On 16 October 2020, Australia created the "Green Safe Travel Zone," allowing people in New Zealand for the past 14 days to travel to Australia without the need to quarantine.
Initially, only New South Wales and Queensland were part of the "green safe travel zone." Vicotria has been added later in November if I am not mistaken.
Everything seemed to be conspiring in my favor, and I would be finally able to travel to Melbourne.
As my lease was almost finishing in New Zealand, I talked to my company, and we arranged flights for 29 January 2021. Later on, the airline rescheduled to 30th due to them shifting all flights from Fridays to Saturdays.
Arriving in Australia, ops… not so fast
As I previously mentioned, I had my flight scheduled for the 30th of January 2021. Unfortunately, little did I know that my plans would need to change fast.
On the 25th of January, Australia paused the "green safe travel zone" for 72 hours due to discovering an NZ resident with the South African COVID-19 variant.
Naively, I thought this would not affect my travel because the New Zealand government said there was no evidence of community transmission, and the alert levels haven't changed. Still, later on, the 28th of January, 2 days before my flight, Australia extended the travel ban for further 72 hours, seeking more information regarding the cases found in New Zealand.
Due to the high volume of people rescheduling the flights, I could only find flights to the 13th of February 2021.
Arriving in Australia Part 2, Maybe?
Because of the end of my lease, I had to move to my girlfriend's parent's house for those 2 weeks to the new date, which was not a problem, and a good opportunity to get to know them better.
One day before we travel, on the 12th of January, Victorian premier Dan Andrews announced a five-day covid lockdown to contain the UK variant that was found. Later on that day, I received a notification saying that my flight was delayed in 5 hours to wait to see if Australia would suspend flights at the federal level.
As we received the notifications around 11 pm, we had no choice but to wait and get our first flight at 6 am from our city in Wellington to Auckland and pray for the Australian government not to close borders.
After 5 hours of wait in the Auckland airport, my partner and I were finally boarding!!!!
We arrived safely in Melbourne, and we didn't need to quarantine or self-isolate. We were fortunate because a day later, on the 14th of Feb, New Zealand implemented a three-day lockdown in Auckland, and the Australian government closed the "green safe travel zone again."
That's the whole story of my almost one-year delayed move from New Zealand to Australia.
This post is getting longer, so I will leave the details of how I arrived at the airport, the first days in lockdown, and other details for the next article.
