Traveling to Kauai here at the start of the post-pandemic - The Pasadena Star-News

I was going to call it journalistic research on travel in the late pandemic, and proof that since we’re distance-working, I might as well be doing it from a beach 2,600 miles from home.

But that sounds a little phony-baloney, even if it’s true enough. For almost three weeks now I haven’t been on vacation, but I haven’t been in Southern California, either.

I mean, have laptop, will travel. And my wife and I have a place we can stay for free that is — I do regret having to tell you this, if the place where you are is too hot, or too cold, or just the same old, same old that all of us have been living in for almost 14 months now — a couple of steps from the water on the North Shore of Kauai.

The WiFi works fine. The white noise blowing in the sliding glass doors from the lanai 24 hours a day to the desk where I type is the lovely combined cacophony of breaking waves in the Pacific Ocean near Hanalei Bay and the trade winds that pretty much never stop, here on the northernmost point of the Hawaiian Islands.

Since the 50th state doesn’t do Daylight Saving, the time is three hours earlier. The newsroom is already humming by the time I stumble out the door to take my daily photograph of the sunrise over the ocean. But I try to brew the coffee and catch up on editing and writing before it gets too late in the California day, and my boss has been most accommodating about it.

I mean, I can join the Zoom meeting with Gavin Newsom’s water people about the coming drought in the West quite easily from here. When I point the camera out the window of this little place — an artist friend once painted it for us, titling his work  “A View with A Room” — toward the supernaturally green cliffs towering above, sure, there might be some howls of envy from Sacramento. Not to mention that, water-wise, I am sitting about two miles as the crow flies from the wettest place on Earth, Mount Waialeale, which sees 444 inches of rain a year. We Californians would love to pirate just a few of those inches.

And, yes, when I post a pic on Instagram of  swaying trees, ripe with papayas, sighted on a tropical hike, a Southern California writer friend says in the comments section: “Stop this or invite me. Aloha for now.”

But it has actually been an interesting experiment in the COVID-19 travel world. Kauai, in addition to being an island, is also a county, and its government has exercised a New Zealand-like lockdown stronger than all the other islands over the last year. First it was a two-week strict quarantine for all arriving travelers — entirely confined to quarters. Then 10 days. Then three days. As soon as it flipped to a simple negative coronavirus test before boarding your flight, with no quarantine at all, we jumped on a plane.

Of course we would never have done so without being fully vaccinated. But, oddly, the Garden Island cares not about your vaccine status, although in coming months all of Hawaii is working toward accepting some kind of vaccine passport. Masking up is still a common courtesy, and required in the grocery store. The restaurants we eat in tend to be outdoorsy and breezy, and the masks go down pretty quickly. While walking on the beach? Everyone knows wearing a mask there is silly.

But Kauai’s isolation has worked. There have been a grand total of 199 cases of COVID-19 here. While locals are surely a little wary of the sudden haole invasion after the year of solitude, they know we were tested in order to get here, and that most older Americans are already fully vaccinated.

It’s been great, putting a toe in the waters of the way we will travel — and work from far away — in a warier future. A pure pleasure to be your aloha canary in a coal mine. And mahalo to our islander friends for welcoming us back.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com. 

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Traveling to Kauai here at the start of the post-pandemic - The Pasadena Star-News
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