Penny’s Bay diary: a practical guide for your week-long stay in ‘The Suites’ at Hong Kong’s government quarantine centre
- Double up on mattresses, get your Wi-fi sorted before arriving, and bring your own coffee (or tea) among the pro tips shared by our managing editor on Day 3
- Reminiscent of the sort of clean, well-kept guesthouse you might find in 1980s China, the rooms at Penny’s Bay are ... not terrible
If you crane your neck while looking out the three-by-four foot window through which all life flows into my cell at Hong Kong’s government-run quarantine centre, you have a sea view. Granted, you must peer through some leafy trees, and it is barely visible, but it is the sea off Lantau Island nonetheless.
That’s about as close as you get to a Hong Kong hotel room feeling here at the Penny’s Bay quarantine lock-up, where travellers from high-risk countries are now required to spend a week before proceeding on to a hotel for the remaining two weeks of mandatory quarantine.
Step across this threshold into a compulsory stay in one of the world’s most stringent quarantine regimes and the initial impression is that it is not a disaster and, in fact, is probably going to be manageable. Constructed for use in the pandemic, these new, clean two-story cell blocks house travellers from countries the Hong Kong government has only recently deemed high-risk due to the rapidly spreading Omicron variant.
My last port of departure was the United States, so I was ushered here on a shuttle bus on Thursday immediately after testing negative for Covid-19 at the airport. Health officials scrawled onto my neck tag the character for bamboo – from the Chinese name for Penny’s Bay – and shuttle bus No 9 onto my neck tag to make certain I went to the right place. Arriving from Los Angeles via San Francisco, I must do my time.
