March 22-23 - Coronavirus lockdown travel plan update

While coronavirus has been known of for approaching three months now, the situation in Australia really only started to escalate around when we were in Melbourne around 8-12 March. There were vague, even fanciful, suggestions at the time about Australia closing its national border, and I considered whether state borders might also be considered for closure. In the back of my mind I was considering where we would want to be if this happened, and the answer was Queensland, for a few reasons. In no particular order:

1. it’s further from Adelaide and harder to explore at a later date than Victoria or NSW
2. it’s a very large state and if we had to be marooned somewhere we may as well be somewhere with plenty of spots to explore 
3. while we've been through parts of Qld on our first trip, there were many areas we missed, and others we'd love to revisit
4. the weather is much nicer, especially in winter, and we really did our packing with warm weather in mind

Of course state border closures were not even being considered at that time, but the situation has evolved so much in the past two weeks that we have more than once reviewed this plan and considered it the best option, even going so far as ensuring we kept moving out of Victoria two days ago so we are moving northwards.

Saturday night while we were getting ready for bed I found a post on a Facebook group we follow which said Northern Territory would be closing its borders as of 4pm Tuesday 24 March, and anyone coming in after that time would be required to self-isolate. With this news we decided we really needed to move promptly towards central / northern NSW, so we would have time to cross the border into Qld if a border lock was implemented. At various times throughout today, we discovered first South Australia, then NSW, then WA, then Vic all intend to lock their borders Tuesday afternoon with similar conditions to NT. When I first drafted this on Sunday afternoon, Qld had not announced any such closure, but it seemed highly likely that they will.

Our plan had been to visit Canberra, Bathurst, Tamworth, then my cousins in Taree, then back to Lightning Ridge, before zipping back to Glen Innes and crossing the NSW/Qld border around Stanthorpe. But of course things have changed since then, and as I write this at 6:30pm on Monday 23 March in Dubbo, we know the Qld border will be locked from free travel as of midnight Wednesday (which we are understanding to be about 30 hours from now).

So we are intending to cross the border around St George in Central Western Queensland. This plan is so we can go via Lightning Ridge (the home of black opal!) and get into Qld near St George before the lockdown starts. We loved noodling for opal in Coober Pedy on our past two trips, and Lightning Ridge was somewhere we had hoped to go one day. So tonight we're going to get as close as we can so we have the good morning and evening light for finding opal, and then have time to cross into Qld Tuesday evening, God willing.

Should we even be travelling?

This is a bit of a vexed question. At this stage we are all in good health and, to the best of our knowledge, are not carrying the virus (although we won’t know for sure for a couple of weeks). We are diligently washing hands to try to keep clean. But travelling under these circumstances isn’t a great idea, and if we were still home we might well have not set out under these circumstances.

The Prime Minister has asked people not to take discretionary travel, which one could argue ours is, or at least was when we set out. Some towns have placed restrictions on tourists buying food at their towns too, as some have selfishly travelled into towns to sack it of supplies which the locals need. But at this stage we don’t have that many options – our van IS our home for this year, as our house in Adelaide is rented out now, so even if we did return home we wouldn’t be able to move back in. It would be extremely unfair to expect our tenants to move out with the current movement restrictions, and for them to try to find another house. The only real option would be to ground ourselves in a single place and just wait it out, but at this stage we intend to push on, carefully monitor our health, maintain good hand hygiene and keep our social distancing, and then follow whatever self-isolation requirements we need to.

By the time we’re done in Qld and are ready to head into NT, it will likely be at least three months, by which time we will be in a much better position to reassess our plans.










-- Greg