Some come home, others stranded
Traveller recounts the rush to leave as hotel prepared to close in Morocco
Betty Dukes made it back, and so did Grace Welch. Kaitlin MacDonald also got home. Cari Soutar and her husband, John Hornung, and their daughters, Amy and Megan, were also among the fortunate Canadians who got out of Morocco, the four now self-isolating for two weeks in their Stittsville home. And after three straight days of travel and numerous non-refundable tickets cancelled, Jocy Medina and her boyfriend, Auday Edan, are finally back in Ottawa.
They got out by hook and by crook, and sometimes by sheer luck. But even with the arrival of government-arranged Air Canada rescue planes — one last weekend, another on Monday and a third scheduled for Wednesday — to repatriate citizens caught in the North African kingdom, many Canadians will remain trapped there a while longer, as travel restrictions due to the novel coronavirus outbreak closed the country’s borders.
“There were about 5,000 Canadians stuck in Morocco when things shut down,” said MacDonald on Monday, “so three planes each carrying 450 people isn’t going to be enough.”
MacDonald, a Moncton resident, started a Canadians in Morocco Facebook page after Morocco announced that all flights into and out of the country would be cancelled, to offer fellow travellers a source of information and connection. The page currently has more than 550 members, and despite being back in Canada, MacDonald remains an active advocate to support and help get others home.
“I want to make sure people have the most up-to-date information,” she says, “so if we hear something, we push it out to the network.”
For MacDonald and her two travel companions, getting back to Canada required driving from one city to another — Fez to Casablanca to Marrakech, for example — endless hours on the phone in futile attempts to book airline tickets, days of self-isolation in hotel rooms, and far too much non-isolation, as they waited for hours in jam-packed airports.
“I’ve never touched so many strangers in my life,” says Stittsville’s Soutar of the overcrowded Marrakech airport. “If you didn’t have coronavirus when you went into that airport, there’s a good chance you had it when you came out.”
Soutar says her family’s escape from Morocco owes a great deal to chance. Staying in a hotel in Marrakech, she awoke in the middle of the night last Wednesday to get a drink of water, and decided at the same time to check the What’sApp group set up, like MacDonald’s Facebook one, to share information with those stranded in the country.
“Someone said that Ryanair just added a flight,” she recalls. So she went to the airline’s site and, finding numerous seats available, began the process of online booking. When she went to check out, however, she realized she was only purchasing one ticket, and not the four she needed. When she retraced her steps, she was able to get four of the last few tickets left. “The whole plane sold out in minutes.
“We were lucky.”
Grace Welch, who got out of Morocco on the 18th, is using some of her time in self-isolation to check up on other travellers she met on her abbreviated trip. Most, she says, are now back in their home countries.
But the ordeal, the Carlingwood resident notes, was surreal. The hotel she stayed at in Marrakech said it expected to close last Friday. “So had we not got out when we did, we weren’t sure where we were going to be. And that was the truly scary part — you just didn’t know. You were never sure where you were going to turn.”
Canadians abroad have been told that they can apply for an emergency loan from the federal government to pay for the costs of repatriation flights.
Those commercial flights began this week. Luke Carroll and Nicole Bayes-Fleming, a Canadian couple stranded in Peru after a South American backpacking trip with a closed Canadian Embassy and shut-down borders, were scheduled to fly back to Canada Tuesday afternoon. The couple did not proceed with a loan application and instead paid about $2,800 for the flights and another $1,200 in flights that had been cancelled.
The questionnaire sent to loan-seeking Canadians by the emergency watch-and-response centre at Global Affairs clearly said that the government was creating a “temporary financial assistance program” called “the COVID-19 Emergency Loan Program for Canadians Abroad.”
Only Canadian citizens who have no other source of money, are stuck outside Canada and are directly affected by measures to slow the spread of COVID -19 were eligible for the loan of up to $5,000 to go toward travel costs and shortterm needs.
Global Affairs defined a traveller affected by COVID -19 as someone who had a return flight booked that was cancelled or delayed, or someone who tried to book a flight but couldn’t because of travel restrictions or high costs. Canadian citizens who are travelling with an immediate family member who is a permanent resident were permitted to include that person in their applications.
To assess eligibility, Global Affairs asked applicants if they have “any family or friends who can transfer funds to you or make purchases on your behalf” and whether they had any other financial options including credit cards or a line of credit. The questionnaire also asked if the applicant had travel insurance and if so, if that insurance covers travel, living or medical expenses in emergency circumstances.
Details about repaying the loan have not yet been made public. With files from Shaamini Yogaretnam. bdeachman@postmedia.com