Lost in Transit: An unexpected family break in Dubai

A steaming Dubai morning. My husband and I land with our children, six and three, with the intention of stretching our legs and sleeping in a bed. It’s a break from the two-day journey from Australia to the UK. We end up staying for six days as the ash-cloud over Europe blocks the skies like some ominous brain intent on havoc.

As we shudder to a halt on the runway, I hear the words ‘ash’ and ‘airports’ uttered by the passengers behind me, but I have two jangly children to unplug from their entertainment consoles and unwind from their seats, and I’m too busy thinking about time differences and bedtime adjustments to pay any real heed to the conversations around me.

We’re ushered to a taxi and make the short journey to our transit hotel. Little River is excited by the tunnel we drive through; his older sister Phoebe sucks tiredly on her thumb. As our bags are unloaded, they amble over to some sandy rubble that leads to a lawned nature strip dividing the hotel from an eight-lane highway across which lies the airport. Soon they are calling through the shimmering heat:

‘A lizard, a dead lizard.’

I drag a bag over and watch them in a kind of slumber as they poke the small, dry reptile.

The hotel lobby is cool and empty; it echoes the sound of our voices. Our flight is for 7.55 the next morning, so we have an early dinner – we’re the only people in the restaurant apart from the chef on his break and three waiting staff – and all fall asleep by 7pm local time.

At 5am the next morning we go downstairs to check out. The reception is heaving: three 30-deep rows of weary, baggage-laden people clutch tickets, robed Muslim women are asleep on the lobby loungers, children tucked into their folds, and chocolate wrappers are strewn on the floor. Another bus-load arrives at the automatic doors.

BBC news is on the lobby TV, but though I see a volcano erupting, read the words ‘Iceland’ and ‘crisis’, we take the shuttle to the airport, to read the word ‘Cancelled’ in red all across the flights board. In a sort of disbelief, we take a taxi back the hotel hoping they will give us our old room back. Luckily they haven’t had time to clean it yet, so perhaps out of ease they give us back the key. The receptionist asks:

 “And will you be paying for this or do you have a voucher from Emirates?”

Emirates? Voucher? In a serendipitous instant, I see a woman across the lobby in the Emirates uniform, holding a long sheet of old-fashioned facsimile paper. I make my way to her, leaving my husband Gareth at the counter, praying inwardly. I blurt my story out to her – small children being my trumps card - and she takes our old boarding-pass numbers down. She says we are on the list and that from now on our meals and accommodation are taken care of by Emirates. I thank her profusely, feeling rather blessed.

 I’ve never stayed in hotels with my kids when travelling. I couldn’t get my head round all four of being us in one room and bedtime with both children to appease at the same time in the same room. But here we are. We will put it to the test, out of necessity. Our luggage is still in transit mode, so we just have our carry-on supplies of toys, a change of clothes and toiletries to unload before heading back downstairs for breakfast. Phoebe and River race down the corridor, River screaming to be the first to press the buttons for the elevator, Phoebe counting the doors down as her flip-flops whack like the exclamations of her excitement.

At breakfast, they are beside themselves at the Coco Pops and juice on tap. As if by magic, there is an abundance of food – how staff could have possibly arranged to feed so many people so suddenly, I don’t know. Huge platters of sliced ruby grapefruit and bowls of fresh fruit, baskets of bread and urns of natural yoghurt are on offer. Still, I’m vaguely anxious that there won’t be enough for all the people who are now scuttling through this hotel, with more arriving every minute. The mother and chef in me, who constantly thinks about feeding people, makes me grab extra apples and wrap pieces of bread in a napkin to take back to our room.

We decide to explore Dubai a little and take the kids to the beach. As we leave the hotel, it’s buzzing with the discontent of more frantic-looking people pressing buttons on mobiles, turning the BBC news up, trying to get the Internet terminals working. The staff, now inundated with challenges like Red Cross workers in a catastrophe, smile graciously as they help the tired, perplexed and needy. Thank God we have our room, I think, as Phoebe skips ahead.

It’s Friday, the Muslim day of rest, so the spice souk is quiet, with only the stalls owned by Indians and Pakistanis open. Dried lemons are whacked open for me to smell, frankincense in huge bags looks like murky crystals. There are also mounds of cinnamon bark, huge jars of saffron, chalky bars of indigo. River falls asleep on Gareth’s shoulder, tiny droplets of sweat on his nose. We walk from shady spot to shady spot as stall-holders beckon us inside, offering sweets to Phoebe and snaring us into conversations:

‘So how much of this you want?’

Now Phoebe is getting grumpy – we’ve been up since 3.30am, as we’re still on Australian time. So we sit at a plastic table outside a café and order fresh mango juice for her and spiced mung beans and roti bread for us. It’s delicious. This is starting to feel like a holiday…

We catch a taxi to Jumeirah for a cool swim. Although we have no swimsuits or sunscreen, we’re all wearing modest underwear (I plan to wear my singlet over my bra) and I hardly imagine a Dubai beach to be the body-beautiful judgmental kind. The beach is beautiful – palm trees and white sand and turquoise waters – and I quickly spot another mother to borrow sunscreen from. A sign by the public toilets lists beach rules, one of which is to respect local custom and wear modest swimwear (the symbol being a woman in a two-piece with a line through it), but here at the foreshore it’s all teeny bikinis and Ray Bans.

River plays by the water’s edge as Phoebe splashes about and I lay my legs out for the sun. I feel the jetlag wobble slowly lift and a peace descends as my eyes close to the sound of laughing children and gentle waves. But we can’t stay long – the midday sun is intense. When we get back to hotel it is still only 1pm and I feel like I’ve been up for a week.

We put the bolt on the room door to keep it ajar and instruct the still-full-of-beans kids to play in the corridors but to keep away from the lifts. Ahh! –the possibilities and freedom of a long, carpeted hotel corridor. Gareth and I watch Fashion TV in bed as the kids come in and out, full of purpose. Phoebe is now wearing one of my T-shirts as a dress (this somehow strikes me as an iconic moment of childhood) and her cheeks are pink from the sun, and gosh, I think, we are kind of having a really good time, all four of us in the bed, cuddling as we watch the Cartoon Network now. When else do we do this? Just do nothing much, together?

In the late afternoon we go outside and sit on the immaculate nature strip, planted with red gladioli and palm trees, beds of hot pink annuals. The odd plane takes off, the kids eat crisps and I do some yoga. Other guests are lounging on the grass too, sunbathing and reading, Phoebe spots a little girl playing on a Nintendo and asks if she wants to be friends. She does.

In the evening we go into the bar to meet Pete, a fellow Australian we got talking to at breakfast. Pete’s on his way to see his son in London, but his son too is stuck, in Morocco. He’s in the bar with two other men, all three of them burnt a deep red – they also went to the beach unprepared. They tell tales of their predicament like war heroes, with a cheery camaraderie. One is an art dealer from Melbourne already thousands of pounds out of pocket through lost deals and disgruntled artists. He’s not hopeful about leaving before Monday.

‘Some people are holding on to too much hope,’ he says, as the enormity of the event unfolds: hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded, flights across Europe cancelled, mangoes rotting in Kenyan warehouses, rail strikes in France, hire cars all taken, and all future flights pre-booked so that even when the air clears there’ll be no room on the planes anyway.

I feel daunted now. How is this going to be managed? What about our luggage? When will we get home?

It’s Tuesday. I do hand-washing every morning, hang little knickers from coat-hangers to catch the breeze from the air conditioner. I wipe the sinks down with facecloths and stock the mini-bar fridge with more apples and milk, like the industrious homemaker. Phoebe and her new friend are thick as thieves. We have a kind of ritual. Each day the children check the lizard – flipped on its back now, and starting to crumble – like some talisman of continuity, claiming it as part of their story. We go to the beach in the afternoon and walk the nature strip at dusk, as the calls for prayer haunt the skies, to have Happy Hour drinks at the Premier Inn next door. The kids fall asleep in the same bed together and Gareth and I watch the news until sleep takes us.

Everyone talks to each other – in lifts and the corridors, in the ever-increasing queue for the buffet. Women get dressed up for dinner, like they’ve surrendered to this fate and are in the swing of things. We reclaimed our luggage from the holding bay after two days here and so I too am making little fashion stories out of ‘beach’ and ‘lunch on the lawn’. Pete flew back to Australia on Monday – his time was running out and his son was still stranded. The art dealer took the first flight open to Nice, unable to wait any longer, planning to head across to a fair in Munich via a series of lifts and hire cars. But this morning there is news of flights being re-opened. My husband races to the airport and is told to come back at 10am with our luggage for an afternoon Manchester flight.

Hope! We make it to the airport with our mountain of luggage but already check-in is chaos, filled with hundreds of people, some there since dawn. No one knows if flights are really on or not; bags are being tagged but not taken. We queue for hours only to be given a waiting-list seat. We go to Costa Coffee and the kids munch on shortbread biscuits and push each other around in the courtesy pram while we make use of the airport’s internet facility and send emails and Facebook messages to worried friends and family. By 2pm the flights have been cancelled again, and the airport is now a river of people heading for the taxi rank.
We didn’t check out this morning, just in case this happened – it was sneaky of us, but these are exceptional circumstances. So we trundle our bags back through the lobby as quickly and discreetly as possible. In the spirit of making the best of things and to give the kids some fun after a long and fraught morning, we go to the beach again. Once there, all memories of the morning’s arc of hope to disappointment is washed away in the clear waters and we watch the sun come down on another day in Dubai.  

At 5am on Wednesday our alarm goes off for an airport reccy. But we roll over; last night Emirates told us to stay put in the hotel and wait for them to call us. They booked us on the next available seats, 10 days from now – an eternity. I am really worried now – surely they won’t pay for us to stay here for that long. Phoebe has missed out on lots of school already, and though this break has been quite wonderful in its own surreal way, 10 more days in this hotel room with nowhere to retreat to for privacy and peace, to get away from squeaky voices, and I might lose my perspective and patience. Gareth seems more relaxed; although he has lots of work waiting back in the UK, he is relishing every drop of sun, and his face is glowing with a happiness I have not seen for a long time.  

At 7am I head to the gym for some yoga. Looking out the top-floor windows towards the airport, I see rows of planes in their docks. I run back to our room. The kids are still asleep so I quietly get changed and shove our passports and the boarding passes from yesterday into my bag and make it to the next shuttle bus, grabbing a banana from the buffet en route.

Back at the check-in queue, I see people having their bags loaded onto the turnstile. I jump the line and ask what’s happening. Can we really fly today? The woman says ‘Yes’ and starts to process tickets before realising my family and luggage are not here. I get back to my spot in the queue and make a heated, screeching call to Gareth. He doesn’t believe me, but by the time I get to the front he’s arrived with the kids and our bags and we are handed actual boarding passes for an actual plane that will really be flying.

I am overwhelmed with relief. I do a little ticket dance and the queue of people behind me cheer – our freedom will soon be theirs.