It had been my first October spent in Phong Nha, the last 3 years I had been in Turkey during the winter time and I have never stayed in Vietnam during the wet season. Last month went pretty quickly for me, and I was about to spend my first November in Vietnam, which I guess is mainly out of choice but partly because to go back to the UK would then mean I would not be let back in to Vietnam, or other safe countries, for an unknown amount of time. My parents have being staying at home in England since January so I even if I could get back I wouldn’t want to risk catching the virus on my way back and passing it to them. There is not really an option to go to Turkey either as the flights are not available and any indirect flight I could maybe get would probably cancel or cost far too much. So, I had resigned myself to a winter in Phong Nha but was managing to keep busy.
While the world reached 46.3m Corona cases and 1.2m Corona related deaths on Sunday 1st November, we had woke up to news updates that the UK prime minister had implemented a lockdown to take effect from the 5th November in England. This would not include going to work, school and essential shops – the duration would be for 1 month. This made sense to me as the UK was now 9th in the world for number of cases and 5th for deaths. People from England were still welcome in Turkey but the UK insisted on a 14 day self managed isolation upon returning back home. Turkey was in a better position than the UK, though, so it was surprising that no restrictions had been imposed by Turkey yet. Turkey was 23rd in the world and 21st for deaths but, although people were asked to wear masks and some curfews were in place, they were not in a lockdown position.
In Phong Nha it was sunny and a good breezy day for towel drying while I had bread and butter for breakfast in bed. I spent the morning learning Turkish and pondering over some information on global Forex investments (as you do). For lunch we had tortilla with picnic food. I made a pork, lentil and cider stew in the rice steamer and ended up making quite a big batch of which we had half for dinner and the rest we would freeze. I also managed all my exercises including 31 seconds of standing on my bad foot, the longest I had managed so far.
joloyolo 