A newly-wed couple from the UK celebrating their honeymoon on Rhodes have spoken of their “traumatic” experience of being evacuated from their hotel amid “intense” smoke and the sound of a child screaming: “I don’t want to die”.
Claire and Paul Jones, both 36 from Leicestershire, were celebrating their honeymoon on Rhodes after getting married on July 16.
They travelled to the Greek island two days later on July 18, before the wildfires took hold.
Ms Jones recalled hearing about the fires on Thursday and said by Friday evening, when she and her husband were sitting outside having drinks, it “got really smoky at one point” and there was “ash dropping out of the sky”.
On Saturday, the couple was evacuated by coach from the Village Rhodes Beach Resort in Lindian Village, near Lardos, after she said the situation went from “zero to 100”.
Mrs Jones, a company director, told the PA news agency: “When we woke up [on Saturday], it had pretty much gone, it was clear sky again, it didn’t smell too bad, and we thought they had gotten it under control.”
Throughout the course of the day, she recalled how it “got worse and worse and worse again”, and said she and her husband decided to pack up their belongings, adding the hotel announced they were being evacuated “within 10 minutes” on Saturday.
“That’s how quickly it escalates, it was literally zero to 100,” she said.
“By the time we got our stuff and got to reception, which was probably another 10 minutes, everybody was at reception and you could see the fires.
“They had come over the hill, they were halfway down the hill, and everybody was just panicking.”
Mrs Jones has said she and her husband were “very lucky” as they have now managed to flee via a taxi to Faliraki in the north of the island, where they had planned to stay later in their trip.
“I’m finding it really hard to just switch off, I can’t stop thinking about it,” she added.
“I keep thinking of little things, like there was a little girl on the bus screaming to her mum, ‘I don’t want to die’.
“The kids were petrified because they could see the fire, it wasn’t a nice situation.”
Mrs Jones said as they fled they were given wet towels by the staff at the hotel because “the smoke had got so intense you could hardly breathe”.
While waiting for the coaches to arrive, Mrs Jones recalled: “When we got to the car park and you could see the fires getting closer and closer and closer, and the coaches weren’t turning up… that was really worrying.”
She added: “When we first got on the coach, that was the most scary because I thought, if that wind blows towards us, that fire is going to hit the coach.
“We had to drive through two or three fires on either side of the road, there was no way out, we had to drive through them.
“It was really quite traumatic driving to where we went because you could see everyone fleeing their hotels, and people were walking along the beaches, walking along the roads, and they had babies and small children.”
Mrs Jones said they were driven to a beach where they waited for around two hours watching the fires getting “closer and closer”, before several boats started to pull up on the beach.
“There were loads of people getting dropped off,” she said.
“There was no one from the hotel, there were no holiday reps that we know of, no one knew what was going on.
“You could see the fire getting closer and closer, and then they [the boats] started pulling up on the beach, obviously just people helping.
“People were very wary because there one no one guiding the situation, but we just made the decision to get on one.”
Mrs Jones said they were taken on a speedboat to a larger boat in the direction of Lindos on the island, before “boat hopping” onto two more boats.
“We had to boat hop in the middle of the sea, which was not very pleasant.
“We had to do that three times, [once] in pitch-black dark and you could see the fire.”
After they had arrived in Lindos Bay, Mrs Jones said she and her husband fled via a taxi to Faliraki.
In the taxi, Mrs Jones said they were joined by an older woman and a man, who were dropped off at the airport.
“We found out afterwards that they had come from the fires, and they had none of their stuff,” she said.
“They had their passports and that’s it, they had no cases, it was just them and a bag.”
