On the eve of the summer vacation

It’s now about 18 months since I have had an annual leave from work. Surely I had a few long weekends during last year but there wasn’t a good time to take a vacation down under as it consisted quite much of restrictions and lockdowns. Now that I’m in my last months here and the corona situation has been good here, I had decided to start my five-week-long vacation halfway through February to be able to spend it before I have to start my departure preparations. Yesterday was the day that it was supposed to start, but… I’m getting ahead of myself. You have to read on to see the other side of the but.

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A couple of weeks ago I went to see a match of one of the national sports here. The sport is of course cricket, which has been played in Australia for about 217 years and a few years ago there were a little over 1,5 million registered players here. You can also see the popularity as there is at least one round field in almost every park here and very often there is some match going on. The match at MCG I was seeing was part of the domestic league Big Bash League, which consists of eight teams across Australia. The format in that league isn’t the most traditional test cricket, which can last up to five days per match. It has a more reasonable length of 3 hours. It was hosted by MCG, Melbourne Cricket Ground, which is the world’s 11^th biggest stadium by capacity. The capacity is about 100 000, but because of the restrictions, it was capped to 15 000 spectators. I can only imagine what it would be like with a full house. The cricket matches haven’t filled all the seats, but AFL (Australian Football League) has done it a few times at grand finals. Despite the stadium as sight itself, I was there to check out the sport. Beforehand I did read about the rules, terminology, and watched a couple of videos so I had some idea what is happening in the field. It was quite interesting and entertaining to watch and we got two matches with one ticket as both teams from Melbourne had their matches there. Even with the reduced capacity, it had quite the atmosphere, especially the second match when the MCG home team played.

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As corona canceled the Formula Grand Prix last year, I was hoping to be able to see it this year. It ended up being postponed to September in the hope that the vaccination rollout throughout the year would make possibly having the races less risky. Well as I was going to miss that then, I thought that since they were going to have the Australian Open, I bought a ticket for today as a nice way to start the vacation. I also had planned of having a first interstate trip to Tasmania, where I have planned a week-long road trip around the island state. That was supposed to start next Tuesday.

That brings us to the big but. As I wrote in my last post, there have been some leaks from quarantine hotels to the workers in them. So far they hadn’t caused anything other than reintroducing mask-wearing in all indoor settings. Despite the number of exposure sights, the contact tracing was ahead of it, and the cases dwindled back down. Earlier this week there was another leak in a hotel near the airport, but this time it was the UK variant of the virus. Because of the seemingly greatly more infectious strain, it was a bigger risk that the contact tracing might not be fast enough to keep it at bay. On Friday they held a press conference and announced that the whole state of Victoria will go to five days long snap lockdown with stage 4 restrictions. That would mean all the same restrictions as in the long second wave lockdowns except for a nightly curfew.

Of course, that lockdown means that the Australian Open will be without spectators for those days. That’s why instead of sitting in the tennis audience I’m writing this post. So as if the F1 Grand Prix wasn’t enough, I’m also missing this event. Even if the lockdown is lifted next Thursday, I highly doubt that there is any chance of getting a ticket for the last four days of the tournament. The lockdown also messed up my Tasmania trip as the departure day is within the lockdown. For now, I postponed the trip about a week ahead, hoping the snap lockdown does the work, the state of Tasmania lifts the hard border and I get to go and enjoy the Tassy nature. I only had to take a hit from one of the Airbnb reservations, as it didn’t have availability the next week and I had to cancel it after the 100% refund time had passed.

For other vacation destinations, I have been thinking of Queensland with one or two locations for a road trip. One near Brisbane and the second more north along the coast near Cairns. The idea of seeing New Zealand during this stay down under is sadly fading away. I’ll have to do that trip on another occasion in some years when traveling long distances is feasible. I can only hope that this lockdown is the only one needed for the rest of my stay here.

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