Locked in a Cambodian Hotel Room

We kind of ran out of places to travel.

With a three-month limit in the Schengen zone, our only options seemed to be to go back to somewhere we have already been during this pandemic. But also, the days in Greece were getting cooler and shorter and my only item of cold-weather clothing was a sweatshirt I left on a plane six months ago.

Just as I began thinking about buying a new sweater and spending the winter in Albania, though, a hot, humid tropical country opened their doors. I’ve spent much of my adult life in Cambodia, but that didn’t help any in obtaining a visa during the past year. After suffering an outbreak in early 2021, Cambodia closed its borders and became very difficult to get to.

But in November, just in time to get out of Europe before winter, we were able to get a visa to Cambodia.

Getting to Covid-era Cambodia is quite different than it once was. I used to just hop on a cheap flight to Bangkok and take a combination of train and pick-up truck across the border into Cambodia. But the land borders have been closed for a while and there are very few flights into the country. We arrived at the Athens airport with a stack of documents 2 inches thick, all necessary to fulfill the very particular requirements of being accepted into Cambodia.

Besides visas, we needed to show Covid-19 insurance, a quarantine booking, multiple color copies of our black and white vaccination cards, thousands of dollars in cash deposit and, most important of all, our PCR negative Covid-19 tests with signature and stamp. I spent much of the evening before our flight and morning of departure trying to get our tests signed and stamped, a requirement for Cambodia, but not a practice of the issuing laboratory in Athens.

Traveling in a pandemic is stressful. We have changed plans and missed flights multiple times because of last minute rule changes and other pandemic related hassles. All the requirements for getting into Cambodia made it even more stressful.

I could feel a bead of sweat rolling down my forehead as the staff at the airline counter gathered around our documents and apologized again for taking so long in examining them.

Did I forget a document? Does the doctor’s signature on our PCR tests look suspicious? Did Cambodia change it’s rules again for international arrivals?

Our flight is almost completely empty. It is eerie to be flying in a massive commercial airliner at 36,000 feet almost alone. Row after row is empty and we relax for a bit.

We connect through Singapore which has a color code system for arrivals depending on how infected their departure country is. We receive green armbands which allow us to roam freely around the airport. Other color bands are marched in lines like refugees by guards from one gate to the next.

Unlike our previous flight, the short trip to Phnom Penh is completely full. Upon arrival, the scene is one from a Hollywood apocalypse movie. The virus is taken seriously here. Passengers are herded through by staff in hazmat suits and even some of the passengers come off the plane head to toe in plastic. It takes two hours to get through the examination of paperwork before we are given a final nasal swab by a nurse who was apparently trained by the Khmer Rouge. Unlike the Covid tests I’ve taken in the U.S. and Europe, I can’t say this one wasn’t that bad.

It’s late at night by the time we get to our quarantine hotel where we are set to begin a 7-day test of our sanity. The Cambodian government has devised a program where foreigner quarantine fees will subsidize those of returning Cambodians. So my family is split up for a week with Tola and the kids staying in a room for free and my father and I spending $1000 for the same thing.

A week locked in a small room with no outside contact passes kind of slowly. I managed to log ten kilometers of walking on my FitBit some days just pacing back and forth in the room. Meals would be left outside the door at 7:00, 11:00 and 5:00 and my father’s relentless snoring kept me from getting much sleep despite not having much else to do. Our only window into the outside world was the view to the busy intersection five floors below.

We were released after seven nights and another painful nasal swab, free to roam the streets, go out to eat and see my family again. Life in Cambodia under Covid is very different than that in Europe or the United States though. The first thing I noticed was that everyone was wearing a mask, whether walking, cycling or driving. Many of the shops were roped off with signs that prohibit entry. Instead, the customer has to tell the shopkeeper what they want and it is brought to the front. To gain entry to a bank, market or restaurant one must first be temperature scanned, sprayed down with disinfectant and asked to show a vaccination card.

Cambodia is one of the most vaccinated countries in the world and also has one of the lowest infection rates, so despite the relatively extreme measures taken to prevent the spread of this virus, it does feel like a safe place to be for the time being. And having gone through numerous tests and a quarantine just to get in the country, it felt like we crossed over into some kind of safe zone.

Of course, a few days after being released from quarantine the government decided to open without a quarantine requirement and restrictions have been slowly loosening so that there are fewer and fewer restrictions everyday.

It’s the middle of winter and a comfortable ninety degrees (32C). Bars, restaurants and cafes are open and maybe there’s little reason to think about Covid-19 for just a little while.