The Great Post-Lockdown Escape: Norway, March 2022

After more than a year and a half of self-isolation, I was starting to forget what an airport even smelled like. So when my friend Amira messaged me late last year with the words “we should start planning a holiday again,” I didn’t need convincing. The world was cautiously reopening its doors, and Finland and Switzerland — two countries already welcoming travelers — were first on our radar. We set our sights on Lapland, made a flurry of cancellable hotel bookings (the operative word there being cancellable — we’d learned a thing or two by now), and got to work on an itinerary, mostly to keep ourselves sane.

But Norway had unfinished business with both of us. Amira had been due to fly there in March 2020, only for COVID to slam the country shut days before departure. I still had the itinerary from my own aborted Norway plans sitting untouched in a folder, like a promise I hadn’t kept myself. So when Amira spotted social media chatter in late January that Norway was preparing to drop its entry restrictions entirely, we didn’t hesitate — Lapland and Switzerland were unceremoniously shelved, and we turned our full attention north.

On February 12, the announcement came through: Norway was open, no testing, no quarantine, no registration required. We didn’t even wait for the confirmation email to load properly before booking a VFS Global visa appointment and scrambling to assemble our documents. True to pandemic-era wisdom, we still hadn’t touched flights — book late, get the visa first, was the mantra — but we started the process at the travel agent anyway, watching ticket prices creep upward with every passing day and choosing not to commit until our visas were in hand. Even the visa appointment came with its own dose of anxiety: days before, people close to us tested positive for COVID, sending all of us scrambling for tests of our own. They came back negative, and we exhaled.

Roughly two weeks later, visas approved, we discovered the Lofoten–Oslo flight had already sold out — the itinerary needed surgery. That surgery revealed a second problem: Lofoten had no private clinic offering the PCR-with-fit-to-fly certificate we’d need to get home, and the one option in Tromsø was eye-wateringly expensive. The fix was to add Bergen to the route, home to several private clinics and the famous Norway in a Nutshell journey — a delay that turned into an upgrade.

Then, days before departure, Russia invaded Ukraine. Somehow that hadn’t made it onto my list of worst-case scenarios, and yet there we were, still packing.

After all the sleepless nights, the surging ticket prices, and a geopolitical curveball nobody saw coming, we somehow made it to the airport and joined the check-in queue — which, it turned out, was heaving. Not with holidaymakers, but with young seafarers heading to the US to rejoin cruise ships. A strangely reassuring sight: if the cruise industry was hiring again, holiday travel couldn’t be far behind.

Having checked in online, and with young children in tow, we were waved into the priority line. Qatar Airways didn’t ask for PCR results or vaccine certificates — I’d already called their Doha customer service to confirm they’d only require whatever documentation the destination demanded, and since Norway asked for nothing beyond the visa, neither did the airline. We took a PCR test anyway, just for peace of mind. On a less cheerful note, I learned mid-call that Qatar Airways no longer operates an email address or an Indonesian phone line — everything now goes through their listed customer service number. Convenient for them, perhaps; for customers wanting anything in writing, a quiet downgrade.

The first leg, Jakarta to Doha, departed on time. Doha itself was a shock — the transit hall was as chaotic and crowded as anything from pre-pandemic life. Apparently the rest of the world had already moved on without telling me. The second leg, Doha to Oslo, was equally punctual, and we touched down on schedule at 13:20 the next day. Immigration and baggage claim took about an hour, after which we went hunting for a Lyca Mobile kiosk to grab a Norwegian SIM — only to find it had vanished from the airport entirely. Telkomsel roaming filled the gap, but the lesson is filed away for next time: buy a European SIM before you leave and drop it in a MiFi.

And then — Oslo. We’d arrived.

We only stayed one night before pushing on to Lofoten, choosing the Radisson Blu Airport Hotel purely for its unbeatable proximity — a few meters from the terminal, ideal after a long-haul flight, even if pricier than staying in the city. Our suite had been converted into a family room, spacious enough to feel like two bedrooms in one. The boys, thoroughly wiped out, opted to collapse in the hotel room, while Alyssa and I ventured out to explore Oslo — but that’s a story for the next post.