A Wodonga woman planning the trip of a lifetime with her mum ended up watching a "humanitarian crisis" unfold in Dubai after record flooding.
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Claire Greenhalgh and her mother, Eleanor Shannon, who also lives in Wodonga, flew out on Tuesday, April 16, to The Netherlands for a three-week holiday that had already been postponed owing to the global pandemic.
Ms Shannon wanted to see the tulips in Amsterdam; a bucket list trip first booked five years ago.
The women's 12-hour flight to Dubai International Airport turned into 24 hours spent in the plane including four in a holding pattern waiting for clearance to land at an airport west of Dubai.
Their plane sat on a tarmac in the middle of the desert before it circled Dubai airport for two hours and then spent another four on the tarmac.
Dubai International Airport, the world's busiest for international travel, was rocked after torrential rains lashed the Arabian Peninsula and flooded many areas in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
From Tuesday, April 16, tens of thousands of air passengers were stranded at the Dubai airport as it became impossible to move from or towards the airport as roads turned into rivers due to the unprecedented floods.
Ms Greenhalgh said it was chaos when they finally disembarked at Dubai airport.
"It was eerie; it was still outside with nothing happening and no people around," she said.
"But then we walked into chaos in the airport with people sleeping on floors everywhere and thousands of people in lines trying to re-book cancelled flights and only two people on the desk!"
Over three days the women queued for seven hours, twice, and had boarding passes re-issued four times that resulted in no flights.
They slept on chairs and even propped up on the floor.
Tens of thousands of people had no clothes, toiletries, sufficient food or way out of it.
Dubai hotels - including $4500 a night suites - were booked out as people caught up the flight backlog were stranded.
Ms Greenhalgh said some passengers were stuck without a flight for five days including some elderly and pregnant.
She said a man could not find his 90-year-old, wheelchair-bound mother, amid the chaos of cancelled flights.
"My mum is five-foot-nothing and there was so much squeezing going on in the queue, she was lifted off her feet; there were women being bowled over," Ms Greenhalgh said.
"That's when I called it quits."
Ms Greenhalgh contacted her sister Leanne Rhodes, who ultimately secured them another Qantas flight from her end in Australia.
"Qantas was absolutely amazing," she said.
"We got an Emirates flight to Singapore and then Melbourne but we literally had to run to catch the plane or risk not getting out of Dubai until April 25 or 26."
The women landed back in Melbourne late on Saturday, April 20, but their luggage was still missing.
In Dubai, luggage was piled up high between the myriad carousels at the airport for days.
Ms Greenhalgh said there were plenty of people in a worse situation than them.
She was now seeking her money back via their travel insurance.
"Mum has called it quits and will never fly internationally again," Ms Greenhalgh said.
"I am so upset as this was her bucket list dream that she will never do now."
Dubai airport was operating at full capacity, authorities announced on Tuesday, April 23, a week after the floods.
It was the heaviest rainfall the UAE had experienced in 75 years; 2155 flights were cancelled and 115 were diverted.
The rainfall Dubai received from April 15 to April 16 surpassed anything documented since the start of data collection in 1949.
