Your Weekly COVID Briefing

A new year begins, we all turn over our calendars…and with a weary sigh, see that international travel rules continue to change, just like in 2021.

Relax, relax - you can stop reading this through your fingers. Most of the news is actually pretty decent this week. Here’s everything you need to know:

In the UK…

• The Government has announced that as of Friday 7 January, travellers coming into England will no longer need to take a pre-departure lateral flow test.
• Travellers also won’t need to wait for the results of a PCR test to get out of self-isolation once they’ve arrived - instead, they’ll be able to take a cheaper and faster lateral flow test.
• The travel industry has unsurprisingly welcomed the news, reporting a surge of new flight bookings this morning.
• Wales has announced that they’re reluctantly agreeing to the decision, but we have yet to hear whether Scotland and Northern Ireland will be following suit - we should hear about that later today.
• Ordinary Britons may be divided on the decision as well - a new YouGov survey has found that 64% of us believe travel restrictions, including testing, should remain in place (although crucially, the survey doesn’t spell out how much testing).

Meanwhile, a new ultra-fast COVID test, designed specifically for use in airports, has just been submitted to the UK’s regulators. If it’s approved, the device will allow travellers to get a result in a very breezy 50 seconds flat.

Further afield…

• Germany has ended its late-December travel ban on visitors from the UK. Vaccinated travellers can now enter again without quarantine, while unvaccinated travellers can escape self-isolation after five days if they have a negative COVID test.
• Israel has re-opened its borders to international travel, although the UK and USA remain on the red list.
• An interesting decision, this, as most countries have focused on entry requirements - UAE citizens will now need a booster jab in order to leave the country andtravel abroad.

If travel planning for 2022 is giving you a headache, you might want to check out the Independent’s new list of the most relaxed entry requirements for countries around the world - including Hungary, Mexico and Sri Lanka.

Backpacking with Myles

Meet Myles! As the latest of our amazing JFC travellers, an avid solo backpacker, and a foreign-language English teacher, he’s giving us a whistle-stop tour of his adventures in Australia…

Myles in Karijini National Park, Western Australia

So how did you begin backpacking, Myles?

It happened about a year after university, completely on a whim! I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life or my career yet. I’d spent a year back at home, saving up money, and I’d been saying forever that I was going to travel around Australia, without ever getting around to it.

I made a snap decision, and I booked a one-way ticket for the very next month.

I hadn’t really travelled much back then - I didn’t even have a valid passport, so I had to get one!

And I went alone. That was definitely daunting at first. But what a lot of people don’t realise is that you meet so many people, and lots of backpackers travel alone - so everyone’s in the same boat.

Honestly, it can also help to be alone when you’re an English traveller - we don’t always have the best reputation abroad! More than once when I’ve been with other English backpackers, travellers from other countries have shied away from us at first.

So how long did you end up staying in Australia?

Two years in total. A lot of that was just luck - I flew into Melbourne and ended up staying for four or five months, I just completely fell in love with it.

It’s my favourite city in the world - it’s got a great vibe to it: bars, good places to eat, street art everywhere. There’s always something going on! And I love to go skateboarding - Melbourne’s skate parks are absolutely brilliant.

Flinders Street, Melbourne

By that time, I needed to make some money back to keep myself afloat. So I headed up the east coast to Cairns and started looking for work on Gumtree.

In the UK, Gumtree has a bit of a bad reputation, but in Australia it’s a lot more reliable and a lot less scary!

I was nervous myself, using it, but I made sure I did my research on the employers I was looking at - checked that they had an online presence, that sort of thing.

I know it’s a lot harder for some travellers, especially female travellers. I was lucky to be able to take a chance and do something different.

A lot of travellers end up doing farm work in Oz, so I was looking for something similar to that, and I ended up being hired to work in a piggery in Queensland.

I’d never done manual labour before, so the whole thing was a culture shock. I also had no idea that the pig farm would be so far from the nearest town. I ended up waking up every morning at about 3 or 4 and then cycling the 15km to start work at dawn.

It was heavy work, and of course you’ll see some things that will shock you, but the people were absolutely lovely and it was a really positive experience for me.

I’ve heard some horror stories since about farm work - a lot of friends did fruit-picking and hated it!

Wow! Was that your biggest challenge in Australia?

No, I can go better than that! After Queensland, I lived and worked in Bondi for a while. Then I set out on a car trip with a friend across the Outback.

We started out in Perth, and the plan was to drive north to Darwin, then all the way back to Melbourne.

We’d rented a second-hand car from a dealership. And we were about halfway up the west coast, driving through the Outback...when we heard a sudden thud.

We pulled over, and one of our tyres was completely flat.

Well, it was 35 degrees in the sun, there was nobody else on the road, and the nearest town was 300km away, but we didn’t panic. It’s the law in Australia that every rental car needs to come with a spare tyre.

We got the tyre out, we winched the car up…

...and realised that the spare tyre was the wrong size for our car. It just wouldn’t go on.

My friend was waiting by the roadside to try and flag down a car. I was going back and forth trying to find a few bars - there isn’t much phone signal in the Outback, of course!

Sometimes you get lucky. The first car we flagged down happened to belong to a repairman - what are the odds?

He said he’d help us, but he was on his way to a job first. “Could you wait here for seven hours?” he asked.

So we sat by the road, eating jam sandwiches, for seven hours in the blazing heat - wondering if he was actually going to come back.

Thankfully, he did, and he took us 300 miles into town to fix up the rental car! We didn’t have much money on us to pay, but he said he was happy with a crate of beer. Our absolute saviour.

That’s brilliant! And then when you got back to Melbourne…

Then I found another job! You can only have a six-month-long job when you’re working on a holiday visa.

I found another position on Gumtree, working at a travel desk in a hostel in St Kilda, by the beach.

In many ways, it was the perfect role for someone who was travelling. You meet people. You chat to them about their experiences and their plans for travel, and you end up with a few fresh ideas of your own!

I met the owner of a company called Kiwi Experience, who run bus tours up and down the entire coast of New Zealand.

So I hopped over there, and after that, I visited Bali, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand.

China is my next stop. I teach English online to Chinese students, and whenever I ask them where they live, I Google it - every Chinese city looks incredible! They’re living in the future.

That sounds like a brilliant plan! And to finish up, the now-traditional final question...what is one under-discovered place that you’d recommend to fellow JFCers?

Surfers at Noosa Main Beach

I’d recommend Noosa - it’s a little town on the east coast of Australia, north of Brisbane.

It’s the kind of place that’s for absolutely everybody. They’ve got surf competitions and brilliant beaches, but incredible natural sights and wildlife as well!

A huge thank-you to Myles! If you think you've got a great travel story to share, we'd love to hear from you - ust drop us an email at [email protected] and let us know the details.

If we pick your story to share in the Detour, we’ll give you a really nifty reward in return: three months of Premium membership, absolutely free, to say thank-you for being so awesome.

Our Pick of the Clicks

All the important (or silly, or strange) travel news from across the web this week

• While everyone at the office struggles to reset their passwords and reschedule their meetings, you might want to check out CN Traveller’s first round-up of 2022 - it’s a list of travel adventures that are best booked 12 months in advance.
• As France is still closed to UK travellers, the Telegraph has been making the case for Slovakia as this season’s hottest (not literally) ski destination.
• Autopilot doesn’t always make flying safer - here’s a slightly terrifying but thankfully rare story about a major incident on an Emirates flight that’s currently under investigation.
• The Orient Express has been teasing their new ultra-luxurious ‘La Dolce Vita’ train journeys, which will take lucky (and hopefully unmurdered) passengers from Italian cities to Rome, Istanbul and Split from 2023.
• Double-check your passport expiry date - post-Brexit, it could come back to bite you, as one unlucky Brit found out this New Year's Eve.
• And if semi-identical photographs of fireworks are your bag, good news! Media outlets everywhere have been sharing their round-ups of New Year’s celebrations from across the world.

Join The Resolution Revolution

After the fiery hellpit of a year that was 2021, a lot of us have been taking a good hard look at their New Year’s resolutions and how they too often make us miserable.

Shouldn’t we instead be looking for ways we can make 2022 a better, happier experience for ourselves?

So with that in mind, we’ve been brainstorming ways for you to live out your resolutions this year with a bit more style - and take in some incredible travel into the bargain.

Want to take on an epic challenge?

World’s Marathons has an extensive calendar of races and challenge events across the globe that are a bit more exciting and inventive than the usual big-city suspects (and give you the chance to travel into the bargain).

So if you ever wanted to run through the South African savannah saying hi to elephants, or dash across the fjords of Greenland, they’ve got you covered.

But we’re particularly thrilled about the Marathon du Medoc in September 2022, which takes place through the vineyards of Bordeaux and which bills itself as ‘the world’s longest marathon.’

Yeah, we could go running here.

Why? Because participants are encouraged to stop at various places along the course to enjoy musical acts, oyster-tasting, a steak meal…and 23 opportunities for wine-tasting from local producers.

Runners make it a point of pride to get through the marathon in good time while taking in as much of the fun as they possibly can (and while often wearing a ridiculous costume, of course).

Registration opens in April. We’ll be fighting you for the last place.

Want to learn a new language?

There’s no better way to learn a language than to immerse yourself fully in the local culture, it’s often said.

Thankfully, Go Overseas offers a catalogue of language programmes, schools and learning opportunities available in countries across the globe.

Since you may not be able to pick up a whole new tongue in a single weekend, you might want to think about packing your bags for a longer adventure. If you’re lucky enough to be able to work remotely, the good news is that more and more countries are encouraging long-term stays; Nomad Girl has an up-to-date list of nations offering ‘digital nomad and freelancer’ visas.

And just to make things even easier on you - Babbel Magazine has done the maths and claims that Norwegian is actually the simplest language for English speakers to learn.

Combine that with a two-year residency permit, and you’ll be checking out (and correctly pronouncing) the magnificent Geirangerfjiord waterfalls in no time.

Want to eat less meat?

Oliver’s Travels can help you out with this one - they’ve compiled an index of the most vegetarian-friendly countries across the world.

Their top pick is the Seychelles, surprisingly; you might imagine that the tropical islands would be all about the seafood, but they actually boast a world-beating 117 vegetarian restaurants shared between a local population of just 98,000.

Expect a whole bunch of delicious Creole-inspired veggie curries on the menu, as well as the local delicacy breadfruit (we’ve written about this one before).

Trying to cut down on drinking?

If you’re trying to take it a bit easier in 2022, you might want to take a look at the results of the World Beer Awards - last year, the title of ‘World’s best non-alcoholic beer’ went to a tiny Edinburgh-based brewery, Jump Ship.

Jump Ship’s zero-alcohol brewskies are stocked in bars and pubs across Edinburgh's historic city centre, so you can check out the sights and have a bit of a pub crawl without having a hangover the next day.

Meanwhile, Lonely Planet have some great recommendations for trendy-looking alcohol-free cocktail bars worldwide, including San Diego, Melbourne, London, NYC…

Want to read more?

We’re desperate to sit down with a good book in 2022 ourselves, but it definitely takes the right atmosphere these days to get us to turn our phones off.

That’s why we’re turning to Condé Nast and their recommendations for the world’s most stunning libraries to get just the right literary vibes.

Our personal favourite has to be the ludicrously beautiful Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading, located in the heart of Rio De Janeiro (I mean, just freaking look at it).

Admission is free, and the library is open every day from 10am-4pm - so settle down in a chair, take a deep breath, and start turning the pages.

Trying to travel more sustainably?

The Guardian’s got you covered here - hot off the press, here’s their list of 22 sustainable travel destinations for 2022.

We’re particularly enchanted by the Wood Hotel; it’s a timber-only eco-friendly hotel, towering over the secluded forests of Skellefteå in Sweden, with views of the Northern Lights in winter and eagle sightings all year around.

Ever wish the UK had more interesting wildlife? Cheer up - an ancient, terrifying nine-foot millipede has just been discovered in Northumberland.

Thanks for reading!