First Person - Nik Dirga wasn't going to make the trip home to California until things returned to "normal" but a family emergency saw him board on a plane only two weeks after Omicron first emerged.
Los Angeles International Airport on 3 December. Photo: 2021 Getty Images
We all took it for granted.
Hop on a plane, cross an ocean or two, watch a few movies, arrive on the other side of the world. "Home for the holidays," we'd say.
In Aotearoa we live on islands on the bottom of the globe, and thousands of us have left big pieces of ourselves elsewhere during the pandemic: Cousins in Australia, siblings in South Africa, nanas in the UK or parents in California.
I didn't want to make a return visit to my native California until things returned to "normal," even though I hadn't seen my parents for going on two years.
But in June, I learned that my mother had Stage IV lung cancer. And normal suddenly didn't seem like anything but a jumble of vowels and consonants.
It was the decision I didn't want to have to make but like thousands of other Kiwis, I've had to make it. Should I go? Can I go? Can I get home again?
So many people have had to make far worse choices, missing funerals or a final chance to say goodbye at all.
When the Omicron variant emerged less than two weeks before my trip to the US, everything went sideways again.
My return trip date has already changed twice in the past fortnight due to changing border conditions and I'm hoping it and my MIQ date remain stable for the rest of my time here.
I can't blame anybody. It's all part of the vanished world we took for granted.
In the pre-pandemic days it was expensive, sure, but logistically easy to make the trip. I've gone back to California around a dozen times since moving to NZ in 2006. But then all the doors slammed shut.
I made do for nearly two years with Skype, Zoom and tools that didn't even exist when I moved to Aotearoa. But any immigrant will tell you, it just isn't the same.
I made the decision to return to California alone, leaving family in New Zealand, and to take a leap into the unknown.
I'm incredibly aware it's a privilege for me to even make that decision, and every day I think about all the other people missing pieces of themselves this holiday season.
The chattering of the internet makes every decision feel like an absolute good or bad, shaming people having to make hard choices in terrible times, but in the end it wasn't a hard call.
I wanted to see my mother and father. Everything else is detail.
The US changed its pre-departure testing requirements three days before my flight out, necessitating a hasty change in appointment time and a 7am rapid Covid-19 test in Auckland the same day I was to fly out at 10.45pm.
Auckland's airport was deserted except for the people on my flight; every shop closed but duty-free whiskey, and a flight full of hungry travellers raided snack machines.
What used to be a fairly easy 12-hour direct shot to San Francisco now required me to go through Los Angeles and then switch to a smaller flight, meaning I spent about 26 hours in airports or airplanes, masked and with increasingly sore ears.
But I got back to see my mother, who is doing OK and responding well to treatment. I got back to the place I grew up, where no matter how long I've been in New Zealand there are pieces of me, scattered in the foothills and pine trees of the Sierra Nevada.
In some ways, the pandemic feels like a world covered with snow, Nik Dirga says. Photo: RNZ / Nik Dirga
A few days after I got here a snowstorm blew in, a headspinning change from humid, sticky Auckland. I woke up to white light seeping in from behind the curtains, a blanket of 10cm or so of snow covering everything.
Everything changes when covered with snow. In some ways, the pandemic feels like a world covered with snow, where we have to adapt how we used to do things, and watch out for the ice beneath.
My view of my homeland and Americans has been warped in these last few chaotic years. I wasn't sure if I would recognise this place where I grew up.
For the first time, I was a little scared to go home.
Like Aotearoa, there are big signs everywhere about masking up when entering businesses and following social distancing.
The main difference is that far fewer people in America seem willing to follow those rules.
Between 20 to 50 percent of visitors at stores I have visited are proudly unmasked despite a statewide mandate and the rise of Omicron. I haven't seen anyone enforcing that mandate at any place I've been.
Face coverings are required in Californian shops. Photo: RNZ / Nik Dirga
To be fair, things have been far worse for far longer here than they ever have been in New Zealand. Fatigue has set in. Everyone has taken their side.
I'm trying to avoid the crowded Christmas shopping. At a store the other day, I overheard a woman behind me, unmasked, yelling into her phone: "I can't smell or taste anything since I had Covid last summer, so Christmas dinner don't matter too much".
The numbers are stark. My small California mountain county of just under 100,000 people has had 121 deaths, compared to only about 50 for New Zealand's 5 million people.
About 63 percent of the eligible population in this area are fully vaccinated, as opposed to about 93 to 95 percent in west Auckland where I live. (American figures include children under 12, who aren't eligible yet for vaccination in New Zealand.)
And the misinformation and conspiracy theory voices are far louder here, bombarding local council meetings yelling and trying to get health officials fired. Entire media organisations are geared at undermining confidence in vaccines and sowing division under the cloak of "freedom," while their ranting celebrity outrage merchants are quietly mostly vaccinated.
For thousands like me who now call New Zealand home, dangerous visits like this are a choice we have had to make. I won't see my wife and son for two months, so I can see my family here now.
It's hard to imagine any immigrant will ever view global travel quite so casually as we did at the end of 2019.