Evacuations are never easy. I learned that recently when an abrupt ban was announced on flights to and from South Africa, which I was visit...
Evacuations are never easy. I learned that recently when an abrupt ban was announced on flights to and from South Africa, which I was visiting on a business assignment. The stream of coverage about the lethal proclivities of the Covid-19 Omicron variant induced worldwide alarm. The panic seemed more contagious than the variant supposedly is.
Not surprisingly, within the span of a single day last week, country after country stopped accepting flights from South Africa. Led by Britain, many Western nations not only cancelled all flights from South Africa but from its neighbouring nations as well. As could be expected, the firm I work for asked me to evacuate from South Africa ASAP, which in corporate parlance is really a poorly disguised euphemism for “immediately”.
A real-time exit
It was November 27, a lazy Friday. I was in the immensely picturesque sea-washed city of Port Elizabeth, on the southern shore of South Africa, when the news about this seamlessly multiplying new variant started hitting the headlines.
PE, as the city is popularly referred to, is relatively old world and remote. There are no international flights linked to any of the big airline hubs from where I could hop on a flight to India before the virus...
