Quotes of the Day
As the mainland-based chairman of the Society for Promoting Taiwanese Business in Shanghai, Chang Fu-mei seldom goes home to his native island. But since returning to Taipei from Shanghai on April 30, he's had more than enough time to reacquaint himself with the inside of his house. Chang's quick trip, necessary mainly to sign a business contract, ran smack into Taiwan's mandatory 10-day quarantine for Taiwanese travelers returning from places hit by SARS. Chang has been forced to count the flowers on his wallpaper while he serves his sentence. "All I can do at home is read," he complains. Adding to his frustration, Chang may be required to spend another 10 days in quarantine when he returns to Shanghai because that city is now isolating visitors from Taiwan.
For members of Asia's globe-trotting class, long accustomed to on-demand, hassle-free transportation, getting from point A to point B is something that can no longer be taken for granted. Travel in a time of atypical pneumonia has become a nightmare of minimal flight schedules, unsettling health checkpoints, official no-go zones and profoundly unwelcoming hosts. You thought airport security was tight after the 9/11 terror attacks? Well, it's no longer enough just to remove your shoes—now it's nearly impossible to fly without having a handheld thermometer shoved in your ear for a body-temp check. Just to be sure, many airports also require you to fill out health questionnaires on how feverish you feel.
Even getting a flight at a convenient time has become a daunting challenge. Faced with a dramatic decline in reservations, airlines such as Cathay Pacific—which last week asked 14,000 of its employees to take four weeks of special leave starting in June—have been forced to slash their schedules by almost 50%. Passenger flow at Hong Kong's Chek Lap Kok airport—formerly heralded as Asia's busiest travel hub—is down 80% since the SARS outbreak, from 100,000 to 20,000 per day. Seats on remaining flights are plentiful, but the SARS epidemic makes mundane trips so irritating that even hardened road warriors are staying home. B.S. (Before SARS), Rahul Shukla, a director of Citigroup Global Market, had the usual peripatetic travel schedule: on the road up to five days a week, dividing his time between Taipei, Seoul, Singapore and Hong Kong. Since SARS? "Zero, almost zero," he says. "We can't enter Taiwan, Singaporeans are concerned, and even in Seoul, clients prefer conference calls."
Inner Mongolia's SARS control office now requires visitors to quarantine themselves for up to two weeks. (That's lax compared with Taiwan, which has slapped outright bans on travelers from the mainland, Hong Kong, Singapore and Canada.) China's central government has insisted that the country's internal borders will remain open, but mobs of angry villagers bent on protecting their towns have thrown up ad hoc roadside health checks and blockades. Ming Productions, a film company scheduled to shoot four movies in China over the coming year, has had to postpone much of its slate because of SARS-related complications. "It's been very disruptive," moans Ming founder Peter Loehr.
And as if China's confusing regulations weren't troublesome enough, many businesspeople must also contend with red tape at their own corporations. One senior banker in Asia says all trips at his company now require the approval of two top-level executives. For good measure, employees returning from SARS-affected areas must quarantine themselves for 10 days—which his bank counts as vacation time.
It's enough to induce a bad case of cabin fever for Asia's office-bound workers—and there's no relief to be had through leisure travel. The suddenly germ-phobic nation of Thailand, which made headlines early in the outbreak by requiring visitors to wear masks under pain of a fine or imprisonment, now hands out "health passports" to travelers from SARS-hit regions. The government says tourists will be required to undergo medical checks every three days for the first 10 days of their stay in the country, recording the results in these passports. While it's far from clear how Thailand plans to enforce the system, Deputy Health Permanent Secretary Dr. Thawat Suntharajarn told the Nation newspaper that the passports will have an unexpected benefit: "After use the passport will become like a souvenir from Thailand."
For once, the prospect of sitting quietly in your office, decked out in a nice clean mask, holds a charm all its own.
- Bryan Walsh / Hong Kong
- Running the Travel Gauntlet