As the US reopened to fully vaccinated travellers from dozens of countries on Monday, it was a morning of joyous reunions, some hard-earned.

Jolly Dave’s odyssey started last weekend, with a seven-hour bus ride from Gujarat to Mumbai. There she took a three-hour flight to New Delhi, then boarded a 16-hour flight to Newark.

Dave, 30, was travelling to meet her boyfriend, Nirmit Shelat, 31, whom she had not seen since last winter, when she had returned to their home state of Gujarat, expecting to stay for a few months.

But then India experienced a devastating coronavirus surge, and her travel was restricted.

Nirmit, a project manager at Bank of America, had stayed in the US. When the US finally lifted its restrictions on travellers from India, Nirmit went online, booked an Air India flight for Dave and paid $1,700 for the one-way ticket from New Delhi to Newark’s Liberty International Airport.

On Sunday night, Nirmit drove 965km north to New Jersey from their home in Charlotte, North Carolina, checked into an Airbnb in Freehold, New Jersey, at 6.30am and then headed to Newark’s Terminal B to greet Dave.

“My Lady Luck is back,” Nirmit said as he waited. “You can make daily calls, stay connected by FaceTime, but you want to experience her fingers, her touch, her kiss. She told me she wants to break the Apple wall.”

They saw each other from down a hallway, and embraced upon reuniting. She kept her mask on as they kissed. He grew emotional. She was carrying three roller suitcases and four bags.

“The Apple wall is broken,” she said.

At Miami International Airport, Natalia Vitorini, a 28-year-old student living in Miami, met her parents on Concourse D after they got off the morning’s first flight from Sao Paulo, Brazil. She had her three-week-old son in a stroller.

Indians at the Newark international airport on Monday after the US reopened travel for fully vaccinated tourists. PTI Photo

Her mother, Debora Vitorini, 56, who works in the biomedical industry in Sao Paulo, bought her ticket within hours of the announcement of the reopening date. She and her husband, Sergio, arrived a little after 6am.

The last time they had seen each other was in March 2020. Natalia Vitorini got pregnant earlier this year, and gave birth to her son a few weeks ago. “I was waiting for the border to open so my mom can come to see my baby,” she said.

When Natalia Abrahao, 40, saw her fiance, Mark Ogertschnig, 45, emerge into Terminal B at Newark off a flight from Amsterdam around noon, she leapt into his arms. He spun her around as she kicked up her heels.

“Finally!” she said. “Finally!”

The couple had got engaged on March 13 last year at Gianni’s, a restaurant in the Versace mansion in Miami, just days before international travel shut down.

Ogertschnig, who is from the Netherlands, had been living in the US, and they lived together for the first five months of the pandemic, but his visa expired and he had to return home. Twice they had taken advantage of a loophole in the travel rules that let travellers from a banned country spend two weeks in a country that was not on the list, such as Canada or Mexico, and then enter the US.

In August, they reunited in Cancun for a week to celebrate her 40th birthday. “I never loved Mexico so much!” she said.

When the US announced its reopening plans, he promised to be on the first flight. He booked a flight for November 1. He then moved it when he found out November 8 was the official reopening.

“I was almost like, if you’re not there the first day, I’m done,” she said, laughing, as she waited for him to emerge from screening.

In the early afternoon, the arrivals area at Kennedy Airport’s Terminal 1 began to fill up with people waiting for loved ones, many with balloons in hand. By the time her mother arrived, Svenja Ostwald’s two daughters had accidentally released the M and I balloons they were holding to spell out “Omi”, a German term of endearment for grandmother.

The two massive silver letters glittered near the ceiling, giving the arrivals area a more festive feeling. Ostwald, 37, who lives in Manhattan, had picked up the girls early from day care in order to greet her mother, Christiane Ecklemann, who was flying in from Frankfurt at 2.04pm. She estimated that if it were not for the travel restrictions, the girls, who are 5 and 3, would have seen their grandmother at least six times.

“I’m overwhelmed,” said Ostwald after she and her daughters hugged Ecklemann, 70, shortly after 3pm.

The distance had been difficult not only for Ostwald, who would have welcomed her mother’s help with the girls, but also, she said, for Ecklemann, who lives alone. “She was isolated, and not being able to share things was hard,” she said.

Soon after the Ostwalds reunited with Ecklemann, a small dog named Whiskey yipped beneath the escaped balloons in Terminal 1. Ye Jin, 36, had brought the dog with her to pick up her mother, Ni Fu Ying, 64, who was flying in from Berlin and who had not visited since the start of the pandemic.

Seeing her mother at last made her grateful that the US was accepting visitors from abroad again, she said, adding that the vaccine rules did not bother her.

“It makes me feel better about her flying,” she said, gesturing to her mother. “I just wish it could have happened much sooner.”

New York Times News Service