Final Deliverance

It might seem like our final deliverance was easy and I'm somehow exaggerating the barriers which lied in our path in the days before exit. But I don't think I'm exaggerating them at all. In reality, we were hit with two completely unexpected blockages: my final exit visa wouldn't issue and Saudi banned all flights (including our flight from Dammam to Dubai, connecting to Cebu) to the UAE. In a country like Saudi Arabia, one challenge might be enough to scupper all your plans, but having two really made it feel like we had a large mountain to move away.

As soon as HR confirmed they couldn't issue my final exit visa and had no solutions of their own apart from my wife and son leaving immediately, I felt very, very anxious about the prospect of a lengthy delay to us reaching the Philippines. It's not like I could just fly them to UAE because that would mean being red listed for Philippine entry. Therefore, I suggested they issue me a standard re-entry visa to enable onward travel. While they dragged their feet and changed my penalty along the way to $1,000, I eventually got what I needed from them to leave the country with my family in tow. 

Mid-way though my visa battle, Saudi announced what can only be called a totally unjustified ban on outbound (inbound is their own affair) travel to the Emirates. Delta Covid was already well established in Saudi (confirmed by Philippine genome testing in April/May) by late spring and outbound travel doesn't bring anything in. In fact, the flight ban looked political to me. Saudi want to launch a new airline to compete with UAE, who they are clearly jealous of. Furthermore, how could Saudi justify a ban on travel to/from UAE when flights were open to London which was positively soaked with Delta? 

Of course, the reasons for the ban weren't important. We had to act very fast to overcome it. Emirates initially pretended the ban wasn't real and left their announcement to the very last minute. Before their website confirmed it, I chatted to them on online chat but they couldn't offer a reroute out of Istanbul or Cairo. Then, later, I called them but their Saudi phone line was super busy and I gave up after 30 minutes. Finally, once they confirmed the ban the following morning, I managed to get through to a super helpful operator. He agreed to reissue our Dammam to Dubai to Cebu ticket to Dubai to Cebu only. Airlines don't allow out of sequence travel and, given the lack of any availability on the Philippine route, this was a pretty kind thing to agree to. Indeed, it took authorization from Dubai to get the ticket reissued. Once Emirates had played ball, I booked a replacement ticket to Dubai via Bahrain on Gulf Airlines. In terms of our luggage, I planned to use a baggage handling service to get it manually transferred onto our flight to Cebu. 

In normal times, none of this would have been required. We would have simply bought another flight with another airline, but these aren't normal times and there isn't hardly any availability on any flights into the Philippines before mid-September. The few flights that remain available this summer are through bucket shops, priced at $8,000 one-way for three, and route through 2-3 countries (hardly ideal and full of potential problems). 

Once I had the exit visa and a viable flight plan to connect with the all important Dubai-Cebu flight, I thought everything would be fairly straightforward, but more unforeseen battles lied ahead. One of them was overcome by a cautious decision to get a Covid test in Dammam on the day before exit. You see, technically we didn't need a PCR test to transit Dubai and Bahrain and enter the Philippines, but our transit wasn't exactly a standard one, so we got one anyway. When we went to the airport for our early morning flight on July 7th, the airport staff refused to allow our son to enter because he wasn't on our Tawakkalna Health App. In lieu of this omission they requested a PCR, which we delightfully handed to them making our caution fully justified. 

Sadly, our trials didn't end with that minor incident entering the airport. Indeed, Gulf Air gave us a 90-minute shakedown during which they called Manila to check our documents, called Dubai to see if they'd accept us, looked with disdain at my surfboard and reluctantly agreed to accept it despite it being 10cm too long under their surfboard requirements, and declined our luggage weight split forcing us to buy a box to reduce the weight in each piece. While we hadn't exceeded the weight limit, Gulf always request that baggage is split 23kg across the 6-bag allowance for 3 people. On a positive note, Gulf tagged the bags all the way to Cebu meaning we wouldn't have to arrange this in Dubai. Anyway, after that episode we grabbed a McDonald's breakfast, cleared immigration and boarded the flight with 40 minutes to go. 

Next step: the Bahrain transit, which proved a very pleasurable experience, especially when my wife's leftover dinars were enough to buy us a delicious super sized caramel coffee and a couple of waters. Such fortune didn't extend to Dubai, where Emirates insisted on contacting Cebu immigration before issuing our boarding passes. This forced us into an unpleasant 4-hour wait for the assurance that nothing else could get in the way. When I went back to the Emirates transfer desk, there had been a change of shift which meant starting again with certain points. Thankfully, Cebu immigration had cleared us, but they still insisted on checking some of our paperwork from scratch. And several hours later, when we tried to board the plane, the airline staff wanted to check our documents yet again. This proved almost too much for my usually laid back wife, who said the whole situation was ridiculous. We really felt like we were some sort of dissidents trying to escape a hostile regime rather than a Filipino dual citizen and her husband and son trying to travel to their home in the Philippines. 

All these events took place on my 48th birthday, which, given the likely surge in my blood pressure, I was blessed to even reach. Of course, it all worked out amazingly well in the end - such an incredible answer to days and days of prayer. For sure, it was a super exciting way to end my second, and final, season in Saudi Arabia. Maybe I had naively planned for a peaceful exit, but what did I really expect except a highly-charged final deliverance from the mysterious, chaotic and ambiguous Kingdom.