Travel travails
Brian Buchanan, Portal Editor
Paris: Travel these days is meant to be a simpler process despite the security checks.
For you have online bookings and searches, better planes and broader access to places to go.
But that does not allow for the natural disaster blighting the skies over Europe now.
And for this writer the problems have happened in threes.
I can’t get home to Dubai as planned, my mobile was blocked and I have very slow internet access to try to sort out my travel travails. More of that in a moment.
As I mentioned in my previous piece I managed to get from Cannes to Paris by train last Friday whether others were left stranded.
One English colleague survived well though. He had planned to go home then fly back to Monte Carlo for another event mid-week but could not escape. Instead he shrugged, stayed in Cannes and heads to Monte Carlo from there.
An Australian colleague is in limbo somewhere. Her French mobile number expired on Friday, she was due in Paris today to fly to Scandinavia on Tuesday to take the long way home. But no word on where she is.
In my little hotel in Paris, customers are constantly at the front desk asking travel questions or seeking an extension on their stay. As did I on Sunday.
At breakfast I exchange war stories with a young Scandinavian businessman who is based in London.
He came to Paris for a day last week and is still looking for a way out as his beard grows.
He flirted with getting a ferry to Ireland and to London from there but even that didn’t work.
I stayed relatively calm through Saturday, hoping the reports then were right that it would be clear before Monday.
So I kept appointments I had made with those who were already in town. One hadn’t made it in, as I mentioned last time.
I spent much time hoping my schoolboy French and recent Alliance Francais lessons in Dubai would help me understand the local TV news well enough. The BBC service and UK web sites tended to focus much more on their home turf than rest of Europe.
By Sunday morning I was seriously concerned, especially because I was having trouble with the Internet connection at the hotel and mobile woes.
The hotel has wifi but it is very weak when your room is on the fourth floor and you move around trying to get a better signal.
To top it my mobile had been blocked from Friday so I could only receive calls and SMS but not ring or send. I had planned to sort it out when I got home but things were getting too serious not to have a full connection
After several expensive calls on the hotel phone to Du, which kept losing the connection (irony there), I finally found out my work in Cannes had pushed me past my credit limit.
But I had had no SMS or email warning from the phone company when it happened.
So while getting that fixed I was trying to keep my net connection alive so I could sort out my travel by email. But at least I also have a helpful office colleague and a travel agent aiding me from Dubai
My Monday flight had been cancelled so I suggested getting out through Nice in the south. Yes there was a flight on Tuesday but all the trains to get me there were booked out.
Too many people had the same bright idea.
So here I am stranded in “the most beautiful city on earth” until I don’t know when. What’s the problem you ask?
Well I like to be occupied, I like my job and I want to keep it (Boss please note).
Meanwhile though on Sunday I finally escaped my hotel room and walked in the “April in Paris” sunshine through the Tuileries Gardens, where the French have promenaded for much more than a century.
On a beautiful afternoon it was easy to forget for a while the frustration of being stranded.
A bonus was a meal with an eccentric school friend from Melbourne, who teaches French businesspeople to speak English – but I suspect with a touch of an Australian accent.
He did his best to keep my spirits up and a walk through the City of Light at night with him certainly helped.
Adam Flinter, Hub Editor
April 19, 1am: There have been a lot of people complaining in the press in the UK about a lack of information at airports and from airlines. I don't see it.
Emirates, BA, Etihad all have up to the minute updates on their websites. I've also seen regular emailed press statements in my inbox which are being updated as soon as possible on gulfnews.com I don't frankly see what more the airlines and the media can do to inform people?
As frustrating as it is, the one thing that is certain is that this situation is no-one's fault at all. It's simply what I've always maintained. You want to stay informed? Get on the internet!
Plan B has quickly become Plan C
April 18, 11pm: Scratch my earlier plan. Plan B has quickly become Plan C.
All trains from London to the continent are fully booked for the next three days it seems. And to put that into some perspective.
Eurostar normally operates 20 trains a day from London, and has put on an extra eight a day because of the increased demand. That means every single day there are potentially 15,624 seats on offer.
There is not one single seat available until Wednesday at the moment.
So while the world's airlines are losing the equivalent of the GDP of a small country every day, someone is defintely doing well out of this crisis.
I was about to turn my attention to cross channel ferries, until I saw on the news that ferry operators are also reporting sell outs with no new tickets being offered for a few days.
The latest possibility running through my head is to catch a ferry from the south of England to Spain and to try and get to Morocco from there...but I reckon that's the least realistic of my plans so far...
I'm now about to turn my attention to buying a rowing boat to tackle the 20-odd miles that separate England from France. How hard can it be?
What to do, what to do?
April 18, 9.40pm: It seems increasingly likely that the ash cloud is not going to shift any time soon (although there were no signs of it on a gloriously sunny day in the London area on Sunday).
So I have spent a considerable amount of time weighing up my options for getting back. Problem is, so has everyone else.
My initial plan B was to catch a Eurostar to the South of France and then try to hop onto a plane from Nice to Dubai sometime on Tuesday morning. I checked on Saturday morning. Train tickets available for Tuesday? Utterly extortionate but yes. Seats available on the plane? Yes. Ok. If all doesn't go well then thats the plan. I was of course going to be utterly reliant on the impeccable French railway system, as even taking the very first train from London at 5.30am leaves me with a 10-minute error margin before the Emirates flight is due to roar into the skies at 4.30pm.
Why am I writing this in the past tense? Well I just checked the flights again on the Emirates website and found that they are now cancelling the Nice flights too. Seems like the ash is everywhere!!
Back to the drawing board.
Right now I am seriously exploring the option of a train to Palermo in Italy, ferry to Tunis and a flight from there to Dubai. Or a three-day rail journey to Athens and hopping onto a plane from there. I may even try to rent a car and drive across half of Europe. An even longer journey.
And there's the dilemma. If I leave on Tuesday and get the plane back on Thursday night. Who is to say flights from London won't have resumed by then too?
What to do, what to do?
Do I wait out for the ash cloud to clear?
Sunday, 8.30pm: Emotions have been up and down like a rollercoaster over the past few days. From the initial groan of finding out my flight (EK008 to Dubai on Saturday) had been cancelled, to the double whammy of finding all flights booked up until Tuesday and now, the realisation that Tuesday was a bit optimistic.
The upside has been that I get to spend a lot more time with family, but realistically I need to try and get back to Dubai so Gulf News don't sack me :-)
I've been down to Heathrow and thankfully people seem to have heeded the advice not to show up. Obviously from a news perspective that means no easy access to stranded passengers to Dubai, but it does mean the news (although sadly not the planes) are getting through.
I've spent the past day contemplating my next move. Do I wait out for the ash cloud to clear? (although the news does say it could last for weeks) or do I make a plan B, C, D and E and hope one of them works?
I guess I'll know more tomorrow (Monday)
