Papamoa Beach, Bay of Plenty: Lockdown Life (March-May 2020)

Long beach walks, daily at both sunrise and sunset were my lockdown rituals. These added beauty, certainty and variety to an unsettling time when those things were so hard to come by in a world rocked by COVID-19.

Every day the sun would rise and set, but each day with different colors and new treasures washed ashore or the delight of a bagpiper playing from the dunes. 

Daily I would see the same other early risers out at first light, so much so that (despite never conversing due to social distancing) my favorite dog walker noticed and commented when I missed seeing him one day at dawn. Some days I paired my three hour walks with long calls home and too many days with news of the toll the virus was taking on the world.

During our seven weeks of lockdown in Papamoa, our days were punctuated by the 1pm press briefing which we watched religiously.  We looked forward to receiving our daily dose of Chief Medical Officer Dr. Ashley Bloomfield and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern as first the numbers climbed and then began to drop.

We watched their appreciation for the front line workers and the care that went into every decision.  We applauded the quick action of the Wage Protection Scheme to protect jobs and save workers from the stress of unemployment.  We loved the realistic “just do your best, we’re not expecting them to learn much” approach to home schooling that kept parents from becoming stressed and the nationwide “Easter Egg Hunt” to keep kids’ spirits high. 

We were buoyed by the cooperation across political parties to put health first and the economy would follow. We re-learned the importance of civil dialog and of tough yet respectful questioning between press and government.  These valuable and heartening lessons streamed into our living room each day at 1pm, causing us to fall deeper in love with this little country of massive heart.

Hale surfed until it was clarified that surfing was not allowed in Level 4 and then switched to afternoon walks until Level 3 allowed for surfing and kitesurfing again.  I abandoned my planned lockdown project to learn to surf before I even pulled on my impulse-bought wetsuit. 

I biked on empty streets until it became clear we weren’t supposed to go too far from home.  I tried gradually adding jogging back and was euphoric for days that it was working, until the day I couldn’t walk and it became painfully clear that my knee is truly done with running.

We ventured out to the grocery once every two weeks for a terrifying experience of masks, hand sanitizer and storing new purchases separately so we wouldn’t catch the virus by touching them.  We appreciated the courtesy and kindness we witnessed in others at the stores and in the stories we read about youth shopping for the elderly.

We alternated spending our inside time doom scrolling or catching up on the blog (we went into lockdown five months behind and left lockdown three months behind so that tells you our ratio.) 

I ate too much, read mindless books and suffered severe insomnia.  I struggled greatly with not being in control of our lives and being unable to plan.  I even missed work in a strange way – wishing I were in a position where I could be making things better for my old team. 

We didn’t bake or do any of the ambitious things that were so annoyingly all over media.  In short, we were not model lockdowners and not always proud of how we reacted, but we stretched the Kiwi mantra of Be Kind to include ourselves.

My journal became so dull that it bored even me and I gave up writing.  (I am composing this months after we left Papamoa.)  I tried to capture our thoughts and feelings in the paragraphs below and to document some highlights and markers of time through the pictures throughout this post and in the several galleries at the bottom of the page. 

Most of all, we were supremely grateful and that is what I will remember as our overriding emotion during this global crisis.

Grateful to be healthy, that our family members were healthy, that a vulnerable dear friend who caught COVID somehow managed to beat it as she has so many things.  Grateful that New Zealand lost so few lives that we still cried over each death rather than becoming numb to them.

Grateful that we were together, supportive and forgiving of each other and already well-honed at happily living in a bubble together 24/7.

Both astounded and grateful every day that somehow our dumb luck had placed us in the perfect place for lockdown.

• Perfect country that eventually eliminated COVID through a community-minded society with strong social cohesion and an overriding faith in science that was willing to sacrifice for the greater good led by an excellent Prime Minister and government that put people first. 
• Perfectly located bach – on a beach where we could continue to enjoy exercise and the beauty of New Zealand despite all trails being closed.  Perfectly sized bach too – big enough to have room to spread out, sit outside, do laundry, stock up the freezer and all the other things that many of our tiny studio accommodations would have lacked.
• Perfect hosts who treated us like whanau to the point of insisting that we stay as true guests and checking on us regularly to see how we were, get to know us and ensure we had everything we needed. 
• Perfect timing with technology that allowed us to stay in close touch with our families who were so far away. 
• Perfect time in our lives to be financially independent and to have lessons behind us that prevented us from panicking over the stock market.
• Perfect ability to stay in a country that didn’t kick out foreigners and instead made us feel welcome as part of the Team of 5 Million.

Every day we felt guilty for having so much good fortune and we continue to do so.  In comparison to so many others in the world, and certainly in comparison to the experience in our home country, it seems wrong to even be writing about our “lockdown experience.” 

We felt (and continue to feel) helpless, horrified and blood-boiling angry watching the US be led down the dangerous and uncaring path to needless deaths and suffering.

Even vividly comprehending how fortunate we are, we still were rocked by realizing how little control we have over our lives.  We had built up a sense of complete self-direction over the last ten years as we planned every step of the way to get us to this goal of perpetual world travel. 

And how ironic that we set out to circle the globe just two months before the emergence of coronavirus in China and five months before borders closed all over the world. 

We’re laughing about that though rather than crying about it.  There is no place on earth that we would rather be when the music stops and everyone has to grab a chair than right here in Aotearoa – a country whose lands and people have well and truly captured our hearts forever.

Lock Down Galleries – A sampling of our two months living to a slower beat

Pre Lockdown – En Route to Papamoa (our last sight of canyons, cliffs or even hills for 2 months)

A Medley of Favorite Beach Sights 1 (every day the tides brought up new life and its remains, while the higher shoreline held natural and man-made pleasures)

A Medley of Favorite Beach Sights 2 (including the start of my new obsession of capturing natural sand art…you’ll see much more of this in the days to come)

A Medley of Favorite Beach Sights 3 (including the last picture= the far, far end of the beach where I never saw another soul)

Friends are hard to come by in times of social distancing (my favorite companion, the lone shag I saw every morning)

Gone Fishin Papamoa Style (A lot of people with a lot of time on their hands and my introduction to torpedo style long line fishing)

COVID-19 (signs of the times, homemade masks and fisheries patrol ensuring no one is out in the water during Level 4)

Skies – My daily ritual of sunrise and sunset treks 1 (who could ask for more than a beach that gets both sunrise and sunset, with different colors every single day?)

Skies – My daily ritual of sunrise and sunset treks 2

Skies – My daily ritual of sunrise and sunset treks 3 (I know, too many pictures, but this is a fraction of what I took as I tried to mark days that felt all too fluid)

Leaving Lockdown (the pleasures of freedom and movement, the realization that autumn had arrived while we were at the beach, a great representation of our sensation of tugging at our docklines and finally the joy of new places)