Chinese family stranded in Seychelles by coronavirus finally home
- Five months stuck on island paradise made the Yang family social media stars in locked down China but adventure is over
- After weeks of frustration, they had just two hours notice that a flight would be departing if they could get to the airport in time
Rex Yang Zhouhu and his mother, sister and three-year-old nephew are under a 14-day self-quarantine in a Shanghai hotel after flying from Ethiopia last Tuesday.
The 33-year-old Chongqing native became a social media star in China after sharing his family’s extended stay on the island of La Digue on Chinese microblogging site Weibo, at the same time many Chinese were under strict lockdown as the country struggled to get the pandemic under control.
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While Yang’s life on the exotic Indian Ocean island – the third-largest in the Seychelles archipelago off East Africa – and his optimism impressed China’s online community, he said the family had been eager to return home since mid-May because of the growing economic costs.
“Because it has been too long,” Yang told Southern Metropolis Daily. “On the other hand, we have been worried about the uncertainties in the future.”
The Seychelles closed its border in mid-March after its first Covid-19 case and, by the end of March, China had also cut most international flights in an attempt to rein in the outbreak. It was not until early June that Beijing announced foreign airlines were allowed to resume travel to one Chinese city each week.
In the Seychelles, lockdown measures had been gradually eased since early May and last month it reopened to commercial flights. For the Yangs, the journey home was to be a bumpy one. Plans continually changed as flights were suddenly cancelled, and there was further anxiety as the other families who were sharing their holiday house managed to return to their own countries.