Home at last for Easter Ross couple stranded by India's snap lockdown during silver wedding celebration; Couple thank Ross-shire Journal for help breaking deadlock
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AN Easter Ross couple's dream anniversary return to the Indian village where they spent their honeymoon turned into a nightmare after they got stranded in a lockdown limbo triggered by the coronavirus crisis.
Calumn and Karen Anderson told this week of how "the world turned upside down" after the return flight from their poignant break to mark their silver wedding anniversary was cancelled at just one day's notice, leaving them totally stranded.
And the couple credited the Ross-shire Journal with helping to get them home after appeals to the Foreign Office and British Airways were met by an alarming wall of silence for the next 10 days.
The Andersons, who live in Alness, flew out from the UK to Goa, via Delhi, on March 4 but then got caught up in India's sweeping lockdown – which came into effect on the day they were due to return, March 25.
In an email to the British Consulate in New Delhi, outlining their full contact, passport and flight details, Mr Anderson wrote: "We are desperate to get home."
Amid an increasingly volatile situation and reports from elsewhere in the nation of visitors being evicted from guest houses, and even attacked in the street, the Andersons shared their plight with the Ross-shire Journal via an email copied in to local MP Jamie Stone. The Journal then contacted the Foreign Office and BA direct on their behalf.
Mr Anderson said that appeared to break the grim deadlock. He said: "We registered with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on March 25 and had no reply at all except an automated email. The article you published on April 4 was shared via social media all over the place. Within four hours of it being published, I received a phone call from the High Commission in Delhi."
He was told flights back to the UK were beginning and given assurances that they, along with a vulnerable 80-year-old fellow Brit whose plight they flagged up, would be included. With an estimated 3000 people registered for repatriation flights back to the UK, the call was as a huge turning point: "The not knowing was the worst thing. That was mentally very hard to deal with.
"I don't know anyone else who was phoned. I'm 100 per cent convinced it was the article by the Ross-shire Journal that got us a phone call. Without your article and it then being shared all over social media, including to the the FCO pages and the Prime Minister, I have no doubt we would currently still be in India."
A gruelling 32-hour trip – including the need to hire a car for the long drive from London –got them back to Easter Ross last Thursday and left them £2000 out of pocket. The couple say that without a supportive network of locals in the village where they were staying, it would have been much harder.
Mr Anderson said: "You didn't have a clue that within days the world would be turned upside down".
The sight of the Cromarty Bridge coming down from the Black Isle towards Easter Ross after the epic car trip home was "unforgettable".
Waiting at home was grown-up daughter Freya who works in a local Co-op – and a very welcome comfortable bed. And despite everything, Mr Anderson, who is now furloughed from his sales job, insists they would definitely go back to place they have always felt welcomed.
He admitted: "You could say it was a wedding anniversary we won't forget in a hurry."
British Airways said it faced huge logistical issues after countries closed their borders but did not comment on the lack of communication. It allows customers to claim in cancelled flights for up to a year. A Foreign Office spokesperson said: "We’ll continue working around the clock to bring people home.”
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