The changing landscape of global travel
It was a few minutes before noon when I received the message. We’d been disconnected for days exploring the coastal dune deserts and rugged mountains of Socotra Island in Yemen, so it might’ve been sitting there for a while, unattended. “Your outbound charter flight has been cancelled. There is no further notice on when it’ll resume.” I stared down at my phone and angled it slightly to avoid the powerful glare from that blazing 40-degree Celsius sun. “Fantastic,” I thought. Stuck in Yemen with a group of fifteen adventurers that had joined our latest Wander Expedition. Between the hopelessness and the lingering anxiety of not being in control, it felt like 2020 all over again. It even had a hint of that similar initial survival hysteria from March last year. That same “every man for himself” feeling. You see, there were limited hotel rooms on the island, far fewer than tourists since every tour usually camped outdoors for accommodation. Amidst this chaos, stranded with my expedition on this Yemeni island in the Horn of Africa, I remembered the lessons learned when COVID-19 went global and caught me exploring India’s Holi Festival on March 8, 2020, days before it was declared a pandemic. read more
