Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Corder.

It's Thursday the 5th of March.

And of course there are still hundreds of thousands of people who are stranded as a result of the Gulf Airspace shut down.

I'm at Sydney Airport where, well, here we have a couple of passengers desperate to get

back to the island of Ireland. Tell me who you are and what your story is. Okay, my name is Keith Wood.

I'm here with my wife to visit grandchildren. We have been to Australia on numerous occasions and have

just flown in from Cairns into

Sydney with no ongoing flight booked, unfortunately, as we are still awaiting a confirmation

from our travel agent in relation to how we get from Sydney back home to Dublin, Ireland.

So as it stands, we have no flight at this moment. We have no accommodation as

we sit here in Sydney, and we're awaiting further instructions from our travel agent, and we

will take things from there. No guarantee that we'll go on a flight tomorrow, so we'll wait to

see what happens over the next two to three hours. So you were originally just going to have a very straightforward flight

via the Gulf going back to Dublin?

That is correct.

Just straight through, we arrived out through Dubai almost two months ago

and literally within the last three or four days with all the news,

we were told that wasn't going to happen to get us back home.

So we will await to see what

happens tomorrow and just take each day as it comes. Very stressful and also very expensive.

Yes, well, it's a little bit more expensive than we thought. We're very fortunate when we come out here.

We have accommodation paid for when we stay with our daughter and our son but this one has been

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