He described the whole city as “shaking” over the next two days as they hunkered down and listened to the “sonic booms” of drone strikes being intercepted.
“We’re on the Palm, so you can see sort of quite a long way down the coastline, and you can just see all the smoke of targets that have been hit.”
Airstrikes throughout the Gulf have continued since the initial co-ordinated US-Israeli attacks that killed Iranian leader Ali Khamenei over the weekend.
Travellers and expats seeking to flee as the war rages on now face a battle to leave the region as domestic carriers have halted most air travel out of the Arabian Peninsula.
The impacts are huge - a significant travel hub for connecting flights across the globe, Dubai International Airport hosts an estimated 90,000 people transiting every day.
Peter and his wife were supposed to fly home to New Zealand on Wednesday, but Emirates cancelled all flights, leaving the couple stuck, forced to figure out a new path home.
With plans to attend a family wedding in New Plymouth this Saturday, they decided to drive eight hours across the border to Oman where they hoped to fly on to Hyderabad.
Visa requirements for travel into India quickly halted those plans and the pair purchased new flights to Bangkok at a costly price.
“It felt a bit like an Amazing Race episode”, he said. “No, seriously, it was like that because we’re just literally picking flights by what’s on the board.”
The couple estimates they have now spent as much as $20,000 to $30,000 each to make it back home.
“When we sat on that plane heading to Bangkok, business was all free, it was almost all empty. And they were, they were moving around with their, you know, credit card machine to try to let people upgrade or move up front.”
Landing back on New Zealand soil at 11.30pm last night on a flight from Singapore, the couple plan to stay here for a few weeks with just a carry-on bag to live out of as the war rages on.
While he’s “happy as hell to be out”, Peter said their 15,000km journey was down to the “luxury” of the funds at their disposal.
“The problem is, you know, when you get on these things there’s actually plenty of seats on them, but they’ve hiked the prices so much.”
Even economy seats for the Muscat to Bangkok leg of their trip were going for as much as $5000.
“There are flights,” he said, “it’s just that people can’t afford to pay the fees.”
He has several “desperate” young colleagues who have booked flights out of the United Arab Emirates that will almost certainly be cancelled.
“I just can’t imagine the stress that they must be under looking at a flight knowing they could get out,“ he said.
Peter is now trying to help them travel to Oman where they can wait for flights back home to Europe.
The 450km crossing will set the fintech workers back hundreds of dollars on top of the skyrocketing cost of their air travel.
And for those who can’t fund that? Peter said they’re simply “screwed”.
