DUBAI The volcanic ash may have scuttled the travel plans of eight million passengers globally, but it could not prevent a Dubai-based British executive from making it to London in time to be with his family.
Russell Lawley Gibbs, 41, a Xerox executive, wrote a running commentary on Facebook from his BlackBerry about the impromptu adventure-cum-tragi-comedy trail.
Gibbs' two-day journey began on April 16 when his 8am Emirates flight from Dubai to Gatwick was cancelled. "When I phoned the airline, someone told me: ‘To be honest with you, we're cancelling all flights to Europe. You probably won't be able to get out of here till the end of the month'."
His 6.08am Friday blog waxed poetic: "Now at (Dubai International) airport. Having breakfast while staff at Emirates see what they can do. It's Madrid, Milan, Nice or Rome. But I wanna go home."
Gibbs flew at 9.25am on a business-class ticket into a packed Nice airport only to be told a labour strike hit the train he planned to take to Toulon, a port city on France's Mediterranean coast.
"At Nice airport, the information desk was a hive of clueless people. The whole place was full of people who didn't want be in Nice, but couldn't get anywhere else."
Luckily at the Nice train station, he found a massive double-deck 200-metre-long TGV [Train à Grande Vitesse, French for ‘high-speed train'] empty. "The train was empty because people thought there was a train workers' strike."
As it went along the coast, more people hopped in. By the time he and a couple of others from Australia, Canada, Japan and South Africa, who clung to him for his French proficiency, reached Toulon, the crowd was massive. "We went to different hotels (in Paris, where they stayed overnight), with journeys in different taxis."
By midnight, he was thrown out of a Paris hotel with his four bags as his credit card did not work. "It was not a pretty sight," he said. His French was of little help with a money changer who gave 30 euros (Dh148) for his £40 (Dh224). He eventually found a youth hostel room for 76 euros (Dh374).
At 7am on Saturday, he went to a chaotic Gare du Nord train station in Paris. Instead of going straight to Calais, Gibbs and company took the Brussels-bound TGV, got off at Lille, dragged his bags half a mile to Lille Europe station, where Eurostar stops. They were in time for the 11am train to Calais.
In this French port city by the Atlantic, Gibbs said the terminal "looked like a refugee centre. Nobody was selling tickets and everyone was profiteering".
At 2.40pm on Saturday, using all the French he knew, Gibbs convinced a Calais dock worker to get him on an old ferry stripped to carry cargo to Dover, in eastern UK. He was initially asked 100 euros (Dh493) for this leg. At 6.04pm, Gibbs and his fellow travellers landed in Dover. "The captain gave me a free ride because I had run out of euros. Others who were with me paid."
He finally reached home at Kingston at 8.13pm on Saturday after taking a train from Dover. Sunday was a busy day for Gibbs with two articles to write for magazines for deadlines next week, work backlog to sort out, kids to amuse, Sunday lunch to cook and his wife to look after.
Was it worth the trouble?
"Yes, it was. I got a lot of things to do. I wasn't going to be beaten by a volcano."
