2 years COVID Hibernation – we are back!
2 years COVID Hibernation had been hard. What does a travel and tourism blog do when nobody can travel?
No, we didn’t sleep all the time. We repaired many things and created new spots but we were extremely limited on our little island of just 229.8 km² or 88.7 square miles.
COVID Hibernation
The COVID Hibernation crashed our island’s economy almost instantly mid-March 2020. All foreign tourists were forced to leave the Philippines. Many of them got blocked in any parts of the country. Others could catch one of the last regular flights. During the first month the situation had been really chaotic.
Then came the depression! We all had been under severe quarantine. Only one member of our household was allowed to go shopping during 1 hour and only once per week.
Our staff wasn’t allowed anymore to come to work. The beach – even our beach – had been declared a “no go zone“!
Quarantine
During 24 months we have been and still are under different levels of quarantine. Governments, national and local, changed quarantine levels very frequently. Not only the levels were changed but also the whole classification system. First we had this GCQ, ECQ and other CQ system. Later came the still existing Alert Levels from 1 to 5. You may want to know more about these Alert Levels.
Nobody knew when this catastrophe would end. Making plans for the future was an impossible task. Many gave up. The real estate market got flooded by sale offers – but almost nobody wanted to invest.
Our local government informed us weekly of the COVID situation on our island:
We had been lucky here on Camiguin. There had been only one local COVID outbreak. We felt rather safe here. This made us mentally survive the harsh quarantine rules.
2 years COVID Hibernation had been hard and then the weather
In autumn 2021 we saw the light at the end of the tunnel. First opening steps were announced and many resorts got prepared for the “New Normal“. Then on October 10, two Tropical Storms joined up in the far north of the Philippines. These storm fusion created a strong wind trough with a 3 to 5 meters high swell on our beaches.
Within 48 hours all our sandy beach had gone. Google Earth just then published an update of their satellite photos.
Normal status of our beach – Google 2016
Our beach washed away on October 11, 2021.
We immediately reinforced our sea-wall and had built a massive wall in front of our park. Fortunately!
Odette!
Our new wall had been almost finished when typhoon Odette/RAI hit our neighbor island Bohol. We had again been lucky. Our wall kept thousands of tons of sand out on the beach. The sea couldn’t flood our garden again with destructive saltwater. But we got some trees from our neighbors.
Trees down from Typhoon Odette/RAY
No power during one month
Unfortunately La Niña is still very actively influencing the weather in the south of the Philippines. Short: It rains cats n’ dogs! This will be our next blog subject.
And now?
2 years COVID Hibernation had been hard. But: You can travel again. You can again come to the Philippines. We can leave our island after 2 years of isolation. Our repairs are almost achieved. We have again reliable power supply. And …
good to here you are gettig back to normal, even “new normal”. We love camigiun island and will shurly visit you place next Time as well.
Thank you Urs.
Just contact us before travelling. We’ll be happy to provide you with the hottest news.
Cheers, waebi
Can’t wait to come back to the island as one who was forced to leave (and leave everything I own there like a moron) I was trapped in a very rural part of the US living with a relative with cancer so we had self imposed restrictions on who could leave the house until a few months ago. When I first found your very helpful blog in 2018 I did not realize that you were writing from the island I was going to. Glad to see you survived the storms but the beach pictures are a shame and the tree damage looks pretty bad.
Thank you for your message.
If I look around just now, I do not see any damage anymore. Nature here is so splendid. Everything is growing really high-speed.
Weather became finally hot and dry just before Easter. Only little problem are the jelly fish that are 2 months too late. We hope they will disappear within a week or two.
Cheers, waebi