“I really want to go home,” says Bo Bijster (37) over the phone from Dubai. “What I find especially sad is that we have ended up in a country where you cannot leave and where no one can enter. The father of my children or my brother cannot come and get us. No one can help us. That is a bad idea.”
The jewelry entrepreneur was flying back to the Netherlands with her daughter (5) and son (4) after a working holiday for her company The It List. That didn’t work out. “We were sitting on the beach right in front of our hotel when we heard loud bangs. And later we saw drones, rockets and fireballs in the dark. insane.” They were in bed that evening when the banging shook the windows of her bedroom, adjacent to the beach. “We were warned that we had to find a shelter, without windows nearby. Then we moved to the bathroom. I put the children in the bathtub with a pillow and lay down on the floor myself.” They stayed there until half past three on Sunday afternoon, with an interruption to eat something in the hotel. “That seemed safest to me.”
Bijster is one of the estimated several thousand Dutch people who, often during their spring break, had completed a trip to countries in the Middle East (or further), were returning home, and are now stranded, says director Frank Radstake of the association of travel companies ANVR. Travel organizations are “busy” to arrange extra overnight stays for participants in their package tours and to find “alternative routes” home. “In some cases this can be done overland, for example to the airport in Oman, but it must be safe. And it is also difficult to offer alternative flights to travelers who are further away in Asia or Oceania and would fly home via the Middle East, because there is now a lot of demand for that.”
Travelers who have arranged their own holiday can hope for support from their airline. “They also have a duty to do so.” On Sunday afternoon, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs received a thousand requests for information from Dutch people in the Middle East about the situation, which is “tense and uncertain”. The ministry advises people, among other things, to “stay indoors, stay away from crowded places and possible targets,” as well as “follow instructions from local authorities.”
Marc Stikvoort (41), manager at transport company Qbuzz, as well as his wife Rosanne (39), a practice assistant at a general practitioner, and their son Ralph (7) also spend anxious hours. “We are shocked by the big blows here,” he says. They cannot return to their hometown of Assen after a “very nice week”. “We had already passed through customs at the airport on Saturday afternoon, when suddenly all flights were canceled and we had to go back together with thousands of others, pick up our luggage again and finally, in the middle of the night, were taken by the airline to a hotel.” That hotel knew nothing about it, he says. “We had to wait three hours before we got a room.” At four o’clock at night they could go to bed. The hotel is “fine”, according to Stikvoort. “We get food and drinks, there is a small swimming pool.”
Cor Zuidema (27) from Friesland, who emigrated to Dubai and works as a real estate agent, helps Dutch people invest in real estate. He lives on the twenty-second floor of a residential tower in the center of Dubai and exchanged that apartment for a stay in a friend’s villa after the shelling began. “I don’t want to take unnecessary risks. A villa is a bit safer than our bedroom with large windows.”
He calls the shelling “not as exciting” as outsiders might think. “The explosions come from anti-aircraft fire against missiles intended for the American bases outside the city, further in the desert.” Zuidema understands the concern and fear of tourists because they cannot leave. But beyond that? “It is not a war zone. There is no panic. The chance of driving a car into a tree is greater than of being hit by a missile.” He texts a ‘national emergency alert’ that people in Dubai received on Sunday morning: “We would like to reassure you that the situation is currently safe, and you may resume your normal activities while continuing to remain cautious.”
