One of the biggest impacts that the COVID-19 pandemic has had is on travel across countries. While almost all countries require negative RT PCR report for entry, many countries have gone to the extent of banning direct flights from specific countries. In this list was Canada that banned direct flights from India. Now, many Indian students and professionals travel to the country for study or work and this embargo brought a new hurdle. However, a new longer was worked out to cross this hurdle. A group of five students from Kolkata who had to return to their university in Canada undertook a journey of over 70 hours via two countries to reach their final destination, reported the Times of India. However, this diverted route not only added extra hours of journey but also scaled up the travelling cost to nearly Rs 3 lakhs from Rs 65,000.
The students Tanya M Parekh, Ahana Jain, Achint Singh, Siya Dugar, and Avnish Pasari started off there at 10:25 AM on Tuesday when they boarded their first to the national capital Delhi, from where they took a connecting flight to Russia's Moscow on the same night at 11: 15 PM. The group arrived in Moscow at 3:15 AM on Wednesday and checked into a hotel before undertaking the mandatory RT-PCR test. After staying for over 24 hours in Moscow, the five students boarded another flight to Frankfurt, Germany. The flight took off at 6:05 AM according to the Russian times and touched down Frankfurt at 08:30 AM as per the local time.
After a long layover of seven and half hours at the airport, the moment of the final takeoff to Toronto finally arrived at 4 PM on Thursday. The group entered Canada with a touchdown at Toronto at 6 PM according to local time when it was 3:45 AM on Friday in India.
And while the long journey finally ended for four of them; Tanya had to take another flight to Vancouver.
Meanwhile, the group of parents of these students had also enrolled for another online parent's group that was planning to send their wards through an alternative route to Vancouver via Mumbai, Male, Abu Dhabi, and Amsterdam in case the plan they had chalked out did not work for some reason at the end moment.
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