[story] Torture in Dubai

How does one become stranded in the United Arab Emirates and consider a new life of asylum in Turkey? It takes a surprise Malaysian airport policy, a team of ill-advised Emirates staff, a ruthless British telecom company, an Australian government apathetic to repatriates, and a touch of overzealous Hong Kong testing regulations to taste.

It is the 29th of June, and with the end of Oxford term looming, I sit down to buy a one-way ticket home. It is ominously difficult; price gouging has invalidated most of the packages sold by aggregator sites, leading to a frenzy of clicking, swearing, and error messages after payment pages. By a miracle later realised a divine prank, I find a £1500 ticket for a marathon journey from London through Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and finally Melbourne. A treacherous 36 hour adventure including two layovers of only 105mins, operated by Emirates and Scoot, but thankfully secured three days before Australia would halve the number of repatriation flights, sending prices to £30k. The then pressing issues of being unable to secure my second vaccine in time, and booking my pre-flight PCR test perilously late before forgetting my passport, would amount to only amusing minor inconveniences.

A month later, I am there; sprawled out on the London Heathrow floor trying to remove £500 worth of overweight luggage from my bags. That evening's lucky janitor goes home with a copy of Rushdie's Midnight's Children, some fetching coats, an over-prioritised wrench, and a kilogram of hard candy (sorry Luke!) - I suspect Benenti's Principles of Quantum Computation didn't make it out the door. That I kept some old shoes and a cat mask can be attributed to the only quality of decision making possible after a night awake frantically cleaning. The check-in lady's mercy over the remaining baggage excess took the form of a £154 fee, or 83% of my bank balance. She next insists I install the 'MySejahtera' app to register myself for transit in Kuala Lumpur, though this app won't accept a home address outside Malaysia (I'm now a registered resident of the airport) nor text a confirmation code to my British mobile with dwindling battery. Worn down by my gormless sleep-deprived expression, she would eventually send me through to my first Emirates flight. A £500 loan from the very sweet Anna Moloney buys my excess baggage for the Scoot flights, and I settle into a restful delirium, unphased by a broken plane tug delaying my first departure, and an announcement that many of my fellow passengers from UAE were yet untested. Life is good.

The first domino falls in Dubai. With the ever-shrinking layover windows in mind, I rush ahead to the gate for my Kuala Lumpur flight and ask to have my seat moved forward. Queue a storm of uneasy phone calls, summoned supervisors, and concerningly deeply furrowed brows. The man tells me I cannot board, since my Kuala Lumpur transfer requires a terminal change, forbidden by Malaysia's National Recovery Plan enacted 29th June - the day of my ticket purchase. He sends me to the grossly unhelpful Emirates help desk who inform me that the next flight to Melbourne is fully booked, and there are no remaining flights until mid-September. They muse that since I have entered the United Arab Emirates, a member of the UK's red list, they cannot return me to London for otherwise prohibitively expensive hotel quarantine. That I am, it would seem, stranded, and that my bags have potentially left for Malaysia. These revelations pulled like teeth over several hours from frenzied staff inundated by other indignant passengers off-loaded from a myriad of flights through Southeast Asia, but whom in their fortune could be flown through other routes; I would be alone in my hopelessness.

After receiving eminently bad advice to enter Dubai and seek travel agents (insistently unable to be telephoned) with 'hidden' reserved seats on tomorrow's full flight - likely a callous attempt by airport staff to rid themselves of me - and the disheartening but ultimately incorrect news there were no upcoming flights to any Australian state, I grow suspicious of the Emirates 'help'. It is time to alert my family. First, my mother puts me in touch with an Australian travel agent who marvels at the flight gap but notes a seat remaining on a potential flight to Perth. According to Emirates, there is no such seat. "Turkey will take you", Alli Panelas consoles. Next, my father forwards my situation to the amazing Penny Meallin, a family friend and travel agent, who begins her own search. In the meantime, I settle by a screaming baby and call my booking company to refund the two imminent flights from Malaysia - but the call dies midway. I've hit my roaming allowance, despite being charged by the minute, and my cellular provider Three's egregious user experience totally precludes increasing it without service. Not only can I now not make calls (to airlines, hotels nor COVID nurses), but coupled with Dubai airport WiFi blocking VoIP, I cannot receive voice calls of any kind. It's text chat from here onward.

Hope! Penny finds a final remaining seat on a three-leg flight to Australia, but not without its complications:

1. It is a business class ticket for $10k AUD - ouch. While held for several hours, it could be cancelled at any moment.
2. It departs Dubai at 3am in 41 hours, by when my existing PCR test will be invalid, and my homelessness will have reduced me to a grimy puddle.
3. It arrives in Sydney, NSW, a state currently under lockdown, and border-closed to my home state Victoria. This invalidates my Victoria hotel quarantine registration and plans to file for fee exemption, and would thereafter see me homeless in plague-afflicted shit-hole Sydney.
4. It transits through Bangkok and Hong Kong. 

It was clear the Hong Kong government wanted nothing to do with me, a fresh traveller through COVID hotspots England and the UAE. A Hong Kong layover meant:

• ​I would need a new PCR test from an clinic with a strictly ISO 15189 certification.
• My trip must be printed on a single boarding pass with destination Sydney. If I were issued two tickets, one destined to Hong Kong, then I would not be permitted to enter Hong Kong and would be barred from boarding in Dubai.

This seemingly ridiculous latter condition proves a huge dismay for the Emirates staff, who, co-operating the trip with Cathay Pacific Airways, cannot guarantee to print the ticket correctly. It takes over two hours of staff deliberation, calls to Hong Kong International, and tongue clicks and head shakes from highly strung supervisors until I am offered the much awaited assurance; that they will refund the ticket if I am unable to board, which they cannot confirm for the next 24 hours. Gee, what a relief... 

A tentative escape planned, and a new $10k debt to my father. Next comes the COVID test, to be taken immediately if the results are to arrive in time. Fortunately Dubai airport has a COVID testing facility. Unfortunately, it is both outside of the transit area, and does not meet Hong Kong's certification requirement. I will need to hire an ISO-certified travelling nurse to enter the airport and administer the test in a DHA-compliant location. This means leaving transit, immigrating into Dubai, meeting the nurse in the departure terminal, testing in the airport facilities, and reporting my case to the Dubai check-in staff. And all organised and communicated over WhatsApp text chat for a one hour rendezvous. Easy, right?

With my over-stuffed gym bag boring into the ruined remains of my shoulder, I set off for an unpleasant encounter with immigration. My footsteps echo down a cavernous marble hall that I can scarcely see the end of, filled with fifty indistinguishable gates and a labyrinth of velvet ropes. In my sleepless drunkenness, the signs make no sense; so I duck under ropes to the nearest gate and plead my case to two impressively bearded men, who, confused by my need to immediately re-enter the airport, suggest I ask Emirates for a chaperone, and loosely gesture to the other side of the hall. To my frustration, my situation is analysed afresh by that Emirates desk. They take my documents, summon supervisors, recheck the Hong Kong layover requirements, and 40 minutes later, send me back to immigration without a chaperone - "it's all in your profile" they reassure me. Saving a minute's walk, I proceed to the now nearest gate and battle to make out a woman's stern voice behind a Plexiglas screen and a niqab. She directs me to remove my mask and glasses and face a camera above a black screen, which appears to stretch and pulsate. Hallucinating and barely standing upright, I turn to report the screen remains blank, redon my glasses in a futile attempt to better understand her impatient muttering, and receive a vicious "did I tell you to look away?". I turn back and chuckle in exasperation, which only upsets her further. "What's so funny?" she demands, but the prospect of my ordeal worsening with the hostage of my passport by an irate and virtually unintelligible immigration officer only amuses me further. "Your passport is broken" she announces. "Get it stamped over there and come back."

I sheepishly wander back passed the Emirates desk, passport in hand, which had indeed been water damaged from within Chris Whittle's pocket seven years earlier in Italy - and it never ceases to benefit me. A new face behind a new desk lazily flips through my passport and instructs me to return to immigration, stampless, deaf to my protests. "Avoid the angry woman" he advises. This time I brave the longer walk across the hall to my original gate, where the bearded men also fail to activate my passport chip. After some time, they permit me through with a wink, and I journey on to the airport testing area, where I am met with suspicion by the non-certified nurses. My travelling nurse arrives just after, dishevelled and looking very much out of place, and ignites a heated argument with airport staff who insist we are not permitted to use their space. As the battle moves telephonic with Emirates Passenger Relations, my nurse quietly mentions he could test me in his car parked outside, or if I prefer, to simply "send my test off now". Bewildered, I decline. Airport staff at last relent and admit us to a cubicle right beside where we have pointlessly fought, in which they illegally join to spectate the nurse shove a swab no more than a centimetre into my nostril and declare "done!". 

I drag myself to check-in. It's 5.30pm, and I've been on my feet in Dubai airport for 11 hours. But this latest desked man has no sympathy. Since my flight departs in two days, it is too early to enter the airport. I implore him to check my profile, which only raises a new concern in him that I will not be admitted into Hong Kong. More phone calls, more supervisors, more delirious swaying. He tells me I must return to check-in at 10pm, when staff will "send my documents to the Hong Kong team" so that I do not find myself off-loaded at the gate once again. He brushes me away to wait at the nearby Costa, where I dismay at the communicative gap and decentralised authority of the Emirates airline. I dare not sleep, in fear my intense exhaustion will keep me unwoken into a new disaster. A WhatsApp message from passenger relations arrives; "Did they mention complimentary hotel accommodation at the connection desk?". They had not, and there was no way back to them now.

Four and a half hours later, I re-approach check-in. A new man with a new understanding and a worse disposition receives me; but I am still too early. He knows of no Hong Kong team, and impassively reads aloud - above another crying baby - the required documentation for my trip, which includes impossible evidence that I have "prepaid" my Australian quarantine package. By now I cannot stand, so perch on the baggage belt before security shoos me off to involuntarily shake with rage at my mistreatment. I demand either admission or accommodation, spurring yet more phone calls, disappearances into backrooms, and by 11.30pm, conceded promises of a hotel. I pass out on the three seats I am moved between before being put in a car. At farewell, my check-in tormentor presses me to "book my quarantine" and I tell him he is "stubbornly misinformed". My chauffeur offers the first sympathetic ear of the ordeal and I am admittedly sad to leave him at Le Meridien Hotel, which in the day's final twist of the knife, claims to have no notice of my stay. Another phone call, another tepid resolution, and I am at long last given a room. It is now 12.30am, 18 hours since I landed in Dubai, 30 hours since I left Oxford, and except for a disturbed nap on the plane, approximately 58 hours since I have last slept. I order dinner, send a hurried email to the Australian Consulate-General in Dubai (failing to contact NSW Health), and sleep deeper than death.

The next day begins uncharacteristically smoothly; my PCR comes back negative, along with an ISO certificate; my change of Australian travel declaration from Melbourne to Sydney poses no new problems, despite violating the 72 hour margin; the consulate confirm by email that NSW quarantine requires no advanced booking. I miss breakfast, and my food voucher won't afford me a room service steak, but I am otherwise well cared for. There is even time to write by the pool! Only when my chauffeur arrives an hour late (for our four minute drive across the road), and the hotel begins to ask why I haven't yet checked out, does my luck swing back to its proper place. It's midnight, but I am well rested for my third check-in skirmish and the countless telephone calls to come. One man quickly becomes four men insisting I need proof of my quarantine booking, reluctantly persuaded by the consulate's email. There's quiet talk about my baggage, which I overhear has miraculously made it to Melbourne without me, but will beat me to Sydney. Thirty minutes of my potential business class lounging are eaten at the desk before I am handed two tickets; to Hong Kong, and to Sydney. Erm - I stress the importance of having a single printed ticket to comply with Hong Kong's draconian airport policy, but am told it is simply impossible; if I am to board, it is with these separate tickets. I can only hope today's gate staff are satisfied.

Incredibly, they are. I am assured Hong Kong airport staff have been informed of my situation, and enjoy 12 hours on the plane's undoubtedly crappiest business seat, with a screen 2m from me occluded by the sun's glare. Nobody arrests me in Bangkok, and staff wait by the plane in Hong Kong to escort me directly to an administrator who strangely isn't compelled to grimace at my documents nor whisper into a telephone. Only 15 hours and an unfamiliarly comfortable flight later, I am in Sydney airport. My bags are here, but that containing my most precious keepsakes has been torn along the bottom, spilling photos and graduation trinkets onto the baggage belt - but I expected nothing less. I'm soon on a coach with a man in full hazmat, and herded into a despairingly small hotel room filled with buzzing lamps and a broken kettle, where I'm put on a diet of inedible meals of thankfully tiny portions, until beating out the boomers in Zoom Bingo to earn some survivable calories in Tim Tam form. Of course, only after organising a new flight and a travel permit to enter Victoria, do I learn Victoria has entered lockdown which has extended passed my expulsion from Sydney quarantine. What awaits me in that airport is known only by the cruellest of Gods.

We have reached today, day 8 of quarantine. There are no lessons here worthy of the damage done on this misadventure, but I offer these relevant reminders:

1. Don't travel during international pandemics, but if you must, fly direct.
2. Don't make the mistake of trusting Emirates staff.
3. Airport supervisors wear red ties.