Note – this post was written in May and June, and covers the month after our return, until mid-June. It is a slightly sad post and has taken a while to finalise and reach a place where we feel comfortable publishing it. Things have settled since then, and we will continue sharing that journey.

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We queue outside Christchurch airport in New Zealand, our names checked off a list by staff of the UK Foreign Office, one of whom seemed like he was fresh out of Eton. Never in our travels has a queue been so orderly as a flight of exclusively British citizens heading back home on a repatriation flight.

They take our temperatures and ask us questions, checking for any signs of COVID. I didn’t tell Ness but I secretly hoped to be turned away – no such luck.

Checking in with Cathay Pacific, we are told that having requested an aisle seat due to my back pain, we have been put in premium economy, which is a huge bonus! We follow signs through the airport, totally empty other than our flight, and so the path shortcuts us past most of the normal coridoors and shops, straight to security and the gate.

Airports are always an interesting place; simultaneously filled with the excitement and dreams of holidays beginning, the mellow atmosphere of holidays ending, and the bustle of people being procesed through a huge commercial machine. This was different.

Aside from the emptiness, the lack of shops and the masks on all of the staff, our fellow passengers had a very different atmosphere to normal. As the last of the repatriation flights from the South Island of New Zealand, we were the long term travellers and in some cases NZ residents who felt like we have no choice other than to return to the UK now, while there is still a chance. In everyone’s mind was that we are leaving this beautiful, welcoming country, one which has successfully fought and beaten a global pandemic, possibly the only country to have eradicated the disease and to be returning to a sense of normality… Flying to the country which has handled the situation as badly as any, still in the midst of chaos. While we were all UK citizens, few of us felt the comfort of returning ‘home’.

This nonetheless created a feeling of solidarity. Possibly the only flight in the world which could be boarded right now free of any fears of the virus, free of the suspicion that the person next to you could be carrying something dangerous. While the cabin crew wore masks, we passengers smiled at each other knowing that we had all played a part in the success of New Zealand, could trust each other, and felt each others sadness to be returning to the UK. Though this was not how we’d planned to return home, it was a very poignant end.

It was a 28 hour journey, including the 3 hour layover in Hong Kong, and was as easy as could be imagined for a trip to literally the other side of the world. Everyone orderly and friendly, empty terminals, the luxury of our premium economy, we couldn’t have asked for better…even the infant sat beside us was too British to disturb the peace by creating a disturbance, instead sleeping peacefully for the whole of both flights. We all had slight nerves in Hong Kong, where our temperatures were taken before getting off the aircraft. If our temperatures were raised then we would be isolated and tested, of course we would be released if we were negative (a certainty coming from NZ) but the flight would have departed without us and we would be waiting in a Hong Kong hotel.

At 6am on 14th May, a matter of seconds after the Heathrow runway opened for the morning, we touched down in London. We were interested to see that in each airport the planes clearly don’t sleep at the gates, and there was an eerie lack of aircraft at one of the world’s busiest airports. As the doors were about to be opened, everyone donned facemasks. As lockdown measures has been so successful in NZ there had been no need for face coverings, but as we stepped off the aircraft we left that bubble of safety behind. (We would learn with bewilderment over the weeks to come that Britain is one of the few countries in the world that seems to eschew face masks)

We had heard ludicrous stories from previous flights, that NZ passengers had been merged into the queue with passengers from other countries where COVID was rife, with no protective measures put in place. As we were one of the very last flights, this was no longer an issue. The aircraft was at the gate directly opposite security, only metres to walk from the gate to the automated immigration controls, then out into baggage. We were all concerned that there would be other flight passengers around, and members of staff, but there was nobody at all, so we soon took off our masks. Baggage in hand, everyone walked out of the airport through desolate buildings, and into the morning sun.

My brother Oliver, and his wife Sarah, were kindly having us to stay for a few weeks. This was no small thing. In the situation as it was, with some people needing to shield and many people worried about opening their doors to someone coming from overseas, finding somewhere to return to had been a stressful process. Oliver and Sarah had been so kind as to welcome us, and we waited at the airport for Oliver to collect us.

We were soon at their home, and had the magical moment of meeting our baby Nephew. Joshua had been born while we were in the Himalaya, and for months we had been dying to meet him. He was a gorgeous bundle of smiles and joy, and Oliver and Sarah were wonderful parents to watch.

It was also wonderful to begin seeing our friends and family again. The hardest part of being away had been not seeing these lovely people, and we were so excited to see everyone. It was a huge shame that our reunions hadn’t been as we’d hoped – we had planned our return, from where we would go for dinner as soon as landed, through to travelling around the country seeing everyone – of course none of this happened, but it was so good to see them again. COVID certainly slowed the process, as we couldn’t just invite lots of people over, so we are trying to get around people as soon as possible.

Aside from this joy of seeing people, our return was hard….really hard. We had expected this, but I don’t think we were braced for quite how hard the experience would be.

We were staying with my brother in a lovely village, in officially the most desirable area in the country, but wow – did it feel horrible. The first thing I noticed was the air quality, for two days I felt that whenever I went out into the village (still quiet in lockdown), I was choking on the air. Thankfully this soon passed, but the next thing didn’t – the overpowering sense of chlaustrophobia. We had both heard from people how the UK was so cramped, and we had rationally known and understood this, but we had never realy felt it.

The space assigned to each family, this plot of land fenced and walled in, with so many others right next to us, was overwhelming. Despite Oliver and Sarah having a beautiful and spacious home, I felt a genuine sense of anxiety, like a belt was being squeezed tighter and tighter around my body. Nothing we cast our eyes on was more than 100m away, most of the time the most expansive view was just across the road to a neighbour’s carefully crafted front garden. Even in the back garden, the sense of being boxed in by the fence was crushing. I felt this worse than Ness, but we had both been totally unprepared for it.

We also had a hard time in dealing with culture shock. We talked about culture shock a lot in our blogs when we first arrived in Asia, then when we left Asia going into Westernised countries, but we had it again in returning to the UK. I’ll save the details for another post, but our return highlighted how the national culture of the UK differs from elsewhere, and we found it really sad. The lockdown into which we returned served to paper over some aspects of this, as the streets were fairly quiet, yet some ways in which Britain had approached the situation also highlighted difrences.

The first week in the UK was really hard, and we feel sorry for Oliver and Sarah who dealt wonderfully with the black clouds which hovered us – their positivity, kindness and openness lifted us up and put us in a much better place, but we were not pleasurable company.

After a couple of weeks enjoying the company of Oliver and Sarah and getting to know our gorgeous nephew Joshua (I learned a lot about doing the baby thing!), it was time to move on. We had gotten over the initial shock and were settled into an emotionally stable place.

We were moving in as a guest of our friend Alex, who has been renting our house…. The slightly odd situation of Alex sub-letting to his landlord.

Returning to our house was like being kicked in the chest, and naively we hadn’t expected it at all. We thought that we were a substantial way up the gradual slope towards feeling comfortable back in the UK, but life wanted to make very clear to us that this was a mountain to climb and that we’d barely left the ground. The emotional impact of returning to this home, even though it was a very different place as Alex’ house rather than ours, was quite profound. We loitered around in a daze, totally disorientated in somewhere so upsettingly familiar.

Being back where we were before this trip was both the cause but also symbolic of why we felt this way. After such an enormous experience we were back to where we had started, as if nothing had changed… We had changed yet the world around us was exactly as it had been before we left, and we now felt so deeply out of place. We’d been experiencing new and wonderful things every day as we had travelled, but now we were being pulled back into a routine, into the mundaneties of life. It felt crushing.

Ness began working, from home of course, and I tried to savour my last week of freedom by ambling around feeling totally lost. Though I used to run a lot (something I can’t do right now), we have never really gone out on walks from home. Now I find myself having to go out for a wander through the nearby woods several times a day, just to escape the prison of familiarity and claustrophobia, to feel space and fresh air. It was then my turn to return to work. My colleagues welcomed me warmly, nothing had changed at all, but it was still a thoroughly disheartening experience and a harsh confirmation of our return to the real world.

A couple of weeks have since passed, and the feelings of being utterly lost have subsided, enabling us to start becoming functioning people again, yet there is still a huge void within us, a sadness in our hearts that it is over and we are back. Our journey around the world is well and truly over for now, but the journey of working out our place in that world still has a long way to go.