I Quit My Job to Travel… and Then Coronavirus Hit

Sayonara To All That

I handed in my resignation in mid-January. The next day, I booked a one-way flight to Tokyo. According to the New York Times Coronavirus Timeline, China reported its first coronavirus death that week.

The decision to leave had been a long time coming. I started at the company four-and-a-half years ago, fresh out of college and hungry to learn it all. Over the course of my time there, I learned and did a tremendous amount, all alongside coworkers who became close friends. But then, I started noticing my own complacency. One day, I looked up to find that everything had changed at the company, but I was somehow still standing in the same place, doing so much of the same on the day-to-day. I’d long outgrown my role, but I’d become so comfortable with, well, the comfortable.

That included the notion of living in San Francisco, too. I’ve loved San Francisco since I first moved to the Bay Area for college nearly a decade ago. But for the past year or two, the lifestyle started feeling monotonous and the worldview, homogenous. I felt like I had checked a bunch of boxes on a Buzzfeed quiz – the neighborhood I called home, the startup that I worked for, the college that I graduated from – and my identity, goals, and beliefs fell in place, likely quirkily titled and all. Was I living by a San Francisco playbook that I had unwittingly absorbed?

These Big Questions jostled around restlessly in my brain, demanding answers that I didn’t have the time, space, or really the grace from myself to consider. I craved clarity – professionally and personally.

Asia… Or So We Thought

Thus, being a millennial and all (mostly joking)… I quit my job to travel for a few months with one of my best friends. Surely, by the end of the trip, I’d have the Big Answers to those Big Questions.

To start, I wanted culture shock. A total departure from laidback San Francisco. Tokyo seemed perfect. We’d then soak in the hot springs of Hakone, temple hop in Kyoto, and eat all of the okonomiyaki in Osaka. We’d fly to Palawan, Philippines to stand in awe of nature, and then bathe elephants in Chiang Mai. Past that, I’d perhaps extend my trip, visit my family in Los Angeles or poetically return to my roots in China. At the time, coronavirus’s quick and devastating path ahead – even within China, outside of Wuhan – was still unfathomable.

But soon, thousands of people were quarantined on the Diamond Princess off the coast of Japan. I followed the news religiously. Is it safe to travel to Asia, I’d Google to start and to end my day. “You’ll be fine,” Google, the CDC, United Airlines, and my coworkers told me in response.

A week before our flight, the US restricted travel to South Korea, Iran, and Italy. The CDC raised the travel warning to Japan to a Level 2: proceed with caution. Leah and I wavered. Should we continue with the trip?

United Airlines wouldn’t cancel the flight with a full refund, but offered to waive change fees to a new destination. The disappointment of waving goodbye to a dream trip to Japan evolved into an exciting opportunity to go anywhere else in the world. We joked about throwing a dart at a map, but chose Colombia, Panama, and a sailing trip through the San Blas Islands after hearing rave reviews from friends and family.

Vamos a Colombia!

The Big Day, the Big Adventure, arrived at last. No one was wearing masks on the plane, and we were the crazy girls wiping down every surface with Purell wipes. They took our temperature at the Bogotá airport and then waved us into the country that I’d quickly fall for.

Colombia was our sanctuary, enriching our lives with history lessons, the friendliest of people, breathtaking views and lots of arepas. Besides washing our hands far more frequently, it still felt like a normal vacation. During the days, we felt so far removed from the rest of the world. I felt much more unsettled in the evenings, which I spent going down endless rabbit holes of COVID-19 articles. We booked a flight home for March 28 from Panama City, a week after our San Blas Islands adventure.

Around the same time San Francisco implemented a shelter-in-place, we arrived in the city of Medellin. Over coffee, we struck up a conversation with an American expat. There was a case of COVID-19 identified right here in El Poblado, he said. Get ready to hear about it a lot more… He was sure that it’d spread fast and furious through Medellin, a city largely dependent on its public transportation system.

Oh, also – don’t count on going on your boat trip, he said.

Sure enough, a couple of hours later, the company let us know that the San Blas Islands government had closed down its borders. It was absolutely the right move. They have an indigenous community to protect on top of needing to reduce the spread for the rest of us too. Soon, Panama shut down their borders as well.

Where To Next?

Guatape was a small, colorful town an hour away from Medellin with a big, famous rock to climb. En route, we befriended a hodge-podge group of travelers from all over the world. Our conversations revolved around one question:

Are you guys trying to get home or stay put?

Some had flights booked for the next week. Some were calling up airlines even as we spoke. Others decided to hunker down in Colombia. On our way home, our tour guide guessed that Medellin was going to close down soon. Our tour to Guatape ended up being one of their last.

Our flight home in two weeks was now inaccessible because of the Panama border shutdown. This meant that we had to quickly decide between:

• Flying to Cartagena and staying for the two nights we had booked, and finding a flight back to the US from there. This bought us a little bit of time without a huge price tag.
• Nixing Cartagena, and taking the next flight out of Medellin. This felt needlessly rushed and expensive.
• Canceling Cartagena and committing to renting an apartment in Medellin (which was far cheaper than Cartagena) for a month or two. The uncertainty around how a potential travel ban would interfere with the 90-day tourism allowance sounded like a logistical nightmare waiting to happen.

Each choice sounded like the wrong one when we sat down to discuss them. And each time we picked one, we’d receive a deluge of conflicting texts from friends and family back home, or read another news article that had us changing our minds. In the Uber to the airport to catch our Cartagena flight, we were still second-guessing ourselves.

Coronavirus Comes to Colombia

The streets were teeming with tourists, taxis, and street vendors hawking their goods in Cartagena. Our hostel informed us that the local government had instated a 10pm curfew in the Walled City. At dinner, a security guard stood outside the restaurant with a gallon of hand sanitizer, pumping it into the palm of any individual who wanted to enter.

That night, we booked a flight back to the US set to leave in two days. Returning to San Francisco, to a cramped apartment where I might expose my roommates didn’t seem like the best idea. I decided to go back to Phoenix with Leah, where an empty house with a big backyard awaited us to self-isolate within comfortably.

The day before we flew out, Cartagena’s streets were quiet. Only a smattering of tourists remained. The Walled City’s curfew was now 6pm. Most restaurants were only open for breakfast and lunch. Tables were spaced out. We grabbed extra pastries at a bakery for a late dinner. The bakery was shuttered the next morning. As we took one last walk before curfew, the town famed for being over-touristed was eerily silent.

We left late morning on a Thursday. The Walled City would be on lockdown all weekend, soon followed by the entire country of Colombia.

Most people were now wiping down surfaces and wearing masks at the airport. While waiting for our gate to open, everyone was tense. The departure board showed cancellation after cancellation of US-bound flights. There was a collective sense of relief and nervous giddiness when our flight was called to board.

At our layover in Atlanta, we were quickly waved through customs. No questions, no health screening. There was an urgency to get us all to the next place, quickly. Our flight to Phoenix was almost empty. We arrived in Phoenix close to midnight, and have been self-isolating ever since.

The Aftermath

Traveling amidst chaos and uncertainty taught me how to quickly pivot when plans changed again and again. It allowed me to share in that “we’re all in this together” bond with other travelers on the road when we all needed it more than ever. I had the privilege of discovering and falling in love with a country that I otherwise would most likely have not ventured to for a few more years. It reinforced to me that joy and pain and fear and grace can all co-exist.

Since I’ve been back in the States, friends have asked me if I regretted taking this leap of faith. In short, I don’t. No one could’ve seen this coming. I knew that quitting a job without another one on the line was a gamble. I’m grateful for the time on the road that I did have, and for the self-growth gained from the uncertainty.

Now, I have all that I desired from this trip – time and space and clarity – in droves right here, in a patch of sunshine on a porch in Phoenix. The stillness feels nice.

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It needs to be said that cutting my Big Adventure short pales in comparison to the tremendous struggles and heartbreak that people are having to face as a result of this global crisis. It doesn’t even come close. I wrote this to document what it was like to travel at the beginning of a global pandemic, when never in a million years did we think it’d become what it has today. I also wrote this to process how this crazy time has played into one aspect of my own journey. Thank you for reading, and I hope you’re staying healthy wherever you are.