…And 4 other things we learned today
This morning came the tweet we had been expecting for a while. The Foreign and Commonwealth office issued their advice that all but essential travel to Colombia should be avoided. This exact wording would signal the end of our trip. The same advice was also issued for Panama.
This is, of course, was unplanned and annoying. Putting aside the larger scale issue of the virus outbreak itself, we learned a few key things about backpacking, insurance, flights and government statements.
1. Insurance Companies love their exclusions
So, not having travel insurance is a dumb move. We aren’t here to state that travel insurance is a waste of time as in most emergency cases it will come to your aid. However, when we ran through our policy documents this morning we noted that exclusion number 2 on the list appears “Epidemics and Pandemics”. Nice one!
Additional to this, the advice to leave Colombia was issued over a weekend. Given that there are rapid movements in reducing flight paths we didn’t want to delay booking our trip home. The annoyance here is that the insurance company had no mechanism for us to get in contact to discuss the emergency. All that was open was the emergency medical call centre. This call centre was also recommend for early return homes. So annoyingly, when they were no help at all and refused to aknowelgde my request for help, we felt left in dark.
Heres hoping we can get some money back for the additional flights we have booked. It’s annoying to spend money on something you can’t have, especially through no fault of your own.
2. Government statements are not detailed enough to help
I’m not saying that governments are responsible to issue every bit of information required during an emergency. However, when advice is given it is frustrating when a complete lack of supporting information is available.
One question which has bounced around is of understanding what the bans mean for flights. Are the flight paths banned, or is it just entry for people from certain countries. One example is our entry to Colombia, where as Europeans, we had an eye cast on us (and had read online that things were getting tough at the border). However, in telling them where we had been in the last 14 days (Peru), we were waved in with gusto.
Added to this, the airlines have varying levels of quality when it comes to communicating their plans to the public. Perhaps one suggestion would be for governments to add just a tinge more detail regarding flight information they have so it’s possible for people to work out a route home in the time of crisis.
As an aside, we found more information on the German Embassy’s website than we did on our own, luckily this was enough to hint at some key dates that helped us make what turned out to be an excellent decision in rebooking.
3. Some people seem to be rather self-centred
In following various forums on backpacking, there has been an overwhelming number of people who are determined to carry on. This usually boils down to an understandable annoyance that people have the time off and they have spent money on flights.
We are in a position of privilege in that we are nearing the end of our adventure anyway. However, there seems to be a real lack of caring when it comes to the fact that people travelling around can cause the spreading of the virus to communities that cannot cope with an outbreak. Even more astonishingly, when this is pointed out, some people seem to take it as a personal insult rather than just someone regurgitating the words of WHO.
4. People spreading unhelpful news is annoying, and dangerous
We have been using an interactive and, for the most part, informative Facebook group as part of our travels. Backpacking South America has given us insights to things we didn’t know about during our trip. However, it is also a forum for complete nonsense.
The last few days have turned the page into a mis-information playground. This has become annoying but also counter productive as information being shared has no source. When researching some of the topics ourselves we have found nothing anywhere to validate certain claims.
It’s more amazing to see how many people seem to solely rely on asking Facebook groups for advice rather than committing to their own google searching. JFGI.
These are our thoughts as we sit away our last few days on our journey. But not to be downtrodden or upset, we have decided instead to celebrate the ending in a more lavish way than we had originally planned. Stay tuned for this when we write our one post about Colombia!
And until then, stay safe everyone xx
Katy and Martin