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Jul 18, 2023

The Unexpected Joys of a Quarantine Hotel

Advertisement Supported by Letter of Recommendation 138 hours in solitude turned

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138 hours in solitude turned out to be just the vacation this writer needed.

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By Pico Iyer

Here was exactly the kind of hotel I had never sought to enter: a generic block in an industrial corner of Osaka, Japan — Rinku Town — across from a vast, empty parking lot and a 24-hour big-box store called Trial. A large, very full bus had collected me at the international airport this stormy night in midwinter, and deposited me, a few minutes later, at the entrance. But I was not permitted to step into the lobby, I was told, and I had to drag my two suitcases through a back entrance and down a long series of windowless service corridors.

At the elevators, a young man in a surgical mask said he’d lead me to my room.

"If you need anything," he offered, as he closed my door on me, "please call 2-6-0-0."

"Can I have some English tea, please?"

"No," he said. "No English tea."

Welcome, in short, to the Hotel California: I could check out anytime I liked, but I could never leave — or at least until 138 hours had passed. Even though I’d just flown out of California, to return to my home in suburban Nara. Yet, with the Omicron variant running wild in January 2022, the Golden State was one of the places on the planet identified as a "red zone." Visitors from other regions could waltz into Japan unimpeded, but everyone disembarking from California was required to spend six days in a quarantine hotel, even after 11 health checks, including a Covid test upon arrival.

I collapsed on a bed, exhausted after 23 hours of travel. When I awoke, at 12:30 a.m., I looked around. I had three beds to myself. Cable TV. A heated toilet. Luxuries far beyond what my wife and I enjoy in our two-room apartment 75 minutes away. Most of all, an unexpected kind of freedom: Nobody could reach me; there was nowhere else I could be. I could spend all day in my pajamas, if I so wished, binge-watching the N.F.L. playoffs for 138 straight hours. As I positioned myself perfectly on the windowsill, I saw a giant Ferris wheel lit up in rainbow colors, radiant in the dark.

We all know that a holiday means liberation from your habits as much as from your home; even in a place not far from where you live, you have the chance to be someone different from the self you know too well. And to see the world you thought you knew afresh. No tickets to buy, no itineraries to fret over. No visas, no injections, no fancy clothes, no people to impress. I’d been living near Osaka for 34 years, but now, for the first time ever, I was getting to see a small part of it from within.

So why not make the most of even an enforced staycation? As Hannah Arendt noted, we cannot be free unless we recall we’re subject to necessity. When the sun came up the next morning, I noticed I was looking out on a restaurant called Joyfull, and a great expanse of blue water and blue sky. An ocean view!

Outside my room, a burly security officer patrolled the corridor. A chair barred my exit. On the chair, however, three times a day appeared a bag of carefully packed goodies. Sweet tangerines and tubs of yogurt, small boxes of pasta and green-tea mochi. I learned to stockpile my salads for when I awoke, at 12:30 a.m., to save my bottles of un-English tea for post-Covid-test celebrations. In some ways, I was getting to fly across the Pacific again and again, but in a first-class suite, and without turbulence or cabin-attendant announcements.

In the days that followed, I marveled at the globe-trotting energy (and annotated every chapter) of an 896-page biography of Tom Stoppard that I would never have completed otherwise. I finally saw that four-hour documentary about the Grateful Dead. Accountable to no one, I could watch every match at the Australian Open, even though my wife might otherwise have been lobbying, hard, for "The Crown." When a friend sent me his 448-page memoir, he was probably surprised to receive a detailed, 21-paragraph response to every word of it the following morning.

I had seldom considered a staycation before, but nor had I often enjoyed such spaciousness and calm before. Five weeks on, I’d be flying to Zanzibar and sailing across the Indian Ocean; when the pandemic broke out, I was lucky enough to be waddling among penguins in Antarctica. But all the faraway places I’d seen, over 48 years, had taught me that a destination is only as rich as the freshness I bring to it. And freshness arises in part through freedom from distraction.

When finally I was released, I felt renewed as I walked through the marble-countered lobby and out into bright winter sunlight. I stepped into a car to take me home, and the elderly uniformed driver looked like Michelangelo's David. The price tag for my six well-fed nights in a comfortable hotel came to precisely nothing. No, I wouldn't usually choose a quarantine hotel, but it opened my eyes to how easily I could liberate myself from both routine and obligation by simply staying in a hotel down the road, and becoming someone new. You don't have to travel far to be transformed.

Pico Iyer is the author, most recently, of "The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise."

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