For Alex and Ana Maria Goffi the COVID-19 pandemic has turned their trip to Argentina into a seven-month — and counting — odyssey for the London couple, still marooned there since the early days of the virus crisis.
In the early days of the pandemic, there were plenty of stories of Canadians stranded abroad on cruise ships and other places around the world. But many managed to return home on humanitarian flights arranged by the Canadian government or by paying high sums of money for the few available flights at the time.
But in the Goffis’ case, a combination of bad luck and government restrictions aimed at fighting COVID-19 has made it impossible for the couple to come back and left them isolated even from their family in Argentina.
Goffi and his wife travelled to Argentina on Feb. 25, almost three weeks before the coronavirus was declared a pandemic, and were scheduled to return to Canada on March 30.
They had rented a beach house to spend the last few days of their trip with their family and arrived in Mar de las Pampas on March 15.
“The rest of the family was supposed to arrive on the 17th but on the 16th the government shut down the roads, so my wife and I have been here alone since then,” Goffi said.
“We packed clothes to spend 10 days here and now it has been seven months,” he added laughing.
Two days before their flight was scheduled to depart, the Argentinian government also cancelled all flights in and out of the country, Goffi said.
He said he and his wife missed a humanitarian flight leaving Argentina in April because they didn’t know about it.
When some flights resumed, Goffi said he bought a ticket that would’ve taken them to Miami and then Toronto in July. But given his and his wife’s age, and how the virus was raging in the United States at the time, their doctor advised them against travelling then.
“He said to us it would be too risky,” he said, admitting he rushed to buy the ticket without consulting with anyone out of sheer desperation.
When the prospects of travelling looked a bit better, Goffi then bought a second plane ticket, this time with a route through Bogota, Colombia, and then Toronto, departing Sept. 3. But that flight has been postponed several times in recent weeks, first to Oct. 3 and most recently to Oct. 25.
“Now I have three tickets to go back to Canada,” he said.
Goffi said the postponements have been the result of restrictions imposed by the government in Argentina, which last week reached the 700,000-cases mark and recently reported a rolling seven-day average of 11,000 COVID-19 cases.
“The situation is terrible here,” he said. "and there's no end in sight!"
