My Last Trip That Year Ended in Fourteen Days of Quarantine
A late-November trip to East Africa to inspect goods and sign deals, then five days of centralized quarantine on return and a positive test during home monitoring — fourteen days indoors in total. Four contracts worth over USD 800,000, and not one email missed.
December 21st. I'm writing this at home. My throat is still a little hoarse, and my antigen test just turned negative.
I left the country on November 22nd and came back December 6th. Five days of centralized quarantine, three days of home monitoring, then on the third night the fever hit and I shut myself in for five more days. From landing to testing negative, fourteen full days without setting foot in the office. That trip was my only one of the year.
What It Takes to Leave the Country
Start with the cost. Guangzhou to Dar es Salaam round trip: RMB 28,000. Before the pandemic it was 8,000. A PCR test within 48 hours before departure, at a designated facility, RMB 160 a pop.
The visa took twenty-six days. Midway, the embassy system got upgraded and my documents were kicked back for resubmission. The approval came through five days before the flight.
My wife saw me off at the airport and stood outside security watching until I got through. Three years in, she still worries.
What I Signed on This Trip
Tanzania and Kenya, fifteen days. I inspected two batches of machines and signed four contracts.
The biggest was in Dar es Salaam: six road rollers and two wheel loaders for Mohammed, USD 410,000. He hadn't seen anyone from us in three years, and his first question wasn't business — it was how many vaccine shots I'd had.
The inspection took two days. Six road rollers, and I drove each one out myself to test vibration, steering, and hour meters, while Mohammed's driver wrote down the numbers. The hour meter on the third unit didn't match the year on the nameplate, so I knocked USD 4,000 off on the spot.
The Kenya deal was smaller: two used forklifts, USD 56,000. But it was a new customer — we'd met through online video inspections in 2021, talked for eighteen months, and this was our first face-to-face. He treated me to roast lamb and said he'd watched my inspection videos for two years — and that I'm darker in person than on video.
Coming Home to Quarantine
When I booked the tickets, entry policy was five days of centralized quarantine plus three days of home monitoring. My wife and I planned around that; she took the kid to her parents' place.
I landed in Guangzhou on December 6th and was bused to a quarantine hotel. The room was fifteen square meters, the window wouldn't open, and three meals a day were left on a stool at the door — a knock, wait for them to leave, then open up. The first two days I kept hearing phantom knocks on the wall next door.
On day five the release came by phone call, and I was told to take a taxi home myself. When the driver heard I'd just come out of quarantine, he hesitated before letting me in.
On the third night at home, I spiked a fever of 39.2°C. That was right in the first wave after reopening, and every pharmacy was out of fever medicine. Chen Guodong rode his e-bike over with two boxes of ibuprofen, hung them on my door handle, and shouted up from the stairwell without coming up.
Following Orders from a Quarantine Room
The work couldn't stop. Three of the four contracts had to ship before the Spring Festival.
The hotel Wi-Fi was slow, so I worked off my phone hotspot, laptop balanced on a suitcase. Mornings on documents, afternoons watching loading. For the wheel loader container photos, Lao Wang sent me one set per machine as he loaded, and I checked them one by one from the quarantine room.
The closest call was those two forklifts for Kenya. The engine number in the customs paperwork was off by one digit from the nameplate. Chen Guodong photographed it at the warehouse and sent me the pictures; I corrected the filing from quarantine and resubmitted, clearing two hours before the vessel cut-off.
Those five days, room and board ran RMB 3,100, and I didn't miss a single order email. Quarantine was absurd. The customers' shipping schedules were not.
Absurd or Not, the Orders Were Real
As I write this, Mohammed's eight machines have arrived and cleared customs. He sent unloading videos — road rollers driving off the ship one by one, his driver standing alongside waving.
Fourteen days locked inside, traded for four contracts and over USD 800,000 in business. Everyone in foreign trade does that math in their own way.
The policy keeps shifting and nobody knows what next month looks like. I'll finish following these four orders first, then look at flights abroad again.