We finally moved to a new place on Sunday to be closer to an international airport. We’re now back in Salvador, Brazil after a very expensive five-hour taxi ride, though the one going to the airport when we were leaving Bolivia during the civil unrest last October probably cost more per mile. Things in Lencois didn’t change much since my last post. There’s still a stay-at-home order and all non-essential businesses are closed. Thankfully the post office finally opened back up and Therese got a new fan for her laptop that we ordered weeks ago. If we didn’t get that, we would have had no choice but to go home since her laptop was about to die.
Now we’re in a really nice apartment right next to a beach that we can’t go to. Initially, we only booked three nights to see how things were here, but we just extended our stay for another week. Things are basically the same here where all non-essential businesses are closed, but not sure if there is an official stay-at-home order. There’s a good supermarket a block away so that’s great except that it’s really expensive. The city has over 2 million people so I’m sure they have cases here but it’s hard to find any exact numbers. All we know is that the state we’re in has 332 cases and 4 deaths, and since Salvador is the capital, I assume most of those numbers are from here. It sounds like the next few weeks might be really bad in the US, so we figured we’d stay here as long as things are calm like they seem to be. So we’ll probably keep extending our Airbnb until May, possibly even June. Not surprisingly, our flight options back to the US are very limited at this point, but it looks like more flights will start running again in May, assuming things don’t get any worse.
Thankfully, we hadn’t planned too much for the rest of our trip, but we had planned enough to be nervous about losing a good chunk of money. The big thing we had booked was a trip to the Galapagos. I’m currently trying to get refunds for everything and it’s been a painful process. Luckily all of our accommodations allowed us to cancel for a full refund. All of our flights have been cancelled, and I’m hoping we’ll get full refunds for them as well. Of course, all of the airlines are pushing for vouchers, but I think they’ll give refunds if you ask for them. So far, only two of six flights have told me that they will refund us, but we might not get that refund for one year.
The biggest issue we’re having is with our Galapagos scuba diving liveaboard. They are not offering refunds but are giving us credit that we can use until the end of 2021. We’ll probably end up paying more since they said the prices will go up a bit. And if we do go back to the US, we’ll have to pay for flights back so the additional costs will start adding up quickly. So we’re hoping we can wait it all out and go to the Galapagos later this year without having to return to the US. After reading some dive message boards about other peoples’ situations, I guess we don’t have it that bad since some liveaboards aren’t even giving credit or giving customers credit that needs to be split up between two trips.
The thing that I’m worried about is that a lot of businesses won’t be able to survive this. I’m sure at that point the customer can kiss their money goodbye. Unfortunately, for the things we can’t get refunds for, we won’t be able to make any claims with our travel insurance. Apparently, we need to get the coronavirus to be covered, even though they say they don’t have any pandemic exclusion clauses like other insurance companies do. I’m grateful that we had travel insurance when I had my scooter accident last year, but if they won’t protect the customer in a situation like this, who will? There’s going to be a lot of changes to the travel industry after this is all over and I’m not sure we’re going to be the ones to benefit from it.
Despite the above, we are very grateful to be safe and healthy and still able to work. We are also very appreciative of all the health care professionals putting themselves at risk to help everyone. And let’s not forget about supermarket workers, delivery guys and other essential workers still going to work every day.
So our new place has Netflix. Should we go down the Tiger King rabbit hole?