New Zealand? That’s not a real country!

THEY don’t enjoy it, but most New Zea- landers will admit they have been mistaken for an Australian.

One Kiwi traveller, however, was stunned when border guards refused to believe that New Zealand was a real country.

Chloe Phillips-Harris, 28, was detained in Kazakhstan for two days because immigration officers insisted that New Zealand was a state of Australia.

When her flight touched down in Almaty, the start of an adventure exploring the mountainous country and working on farms quickly turned into a nightmare.

‘I got to an immigration booth and they told me I couldn’t come in without an Australian passport,’ Miss Phillips-Harris said. ‘They said New Zealand was clearly a part of Australia.’ She was barred from entering the country and ushered on to a plane flying to China.

But by making some telephone calls to well-placed contacts she managed to get off that flight, only to be whisked away into a tiny interrogation room. It had an old map on the wall, but it didn’t have New Zealand on it – making it even tougher for her to argue her case.

She was locked in the guarded room for the next day and a half. It had one small bed and she was given no food or water apart from a sip of a soft drink given to her by a friendly guard.

Luckily for Miss Phillips-Harris, her contacts in Kazakhstan provided her with a new visa and, thanks to her dual nationality, an American passport.

After parting with some cash she was free to leave.

New Zealand was originally part of the British colony of New South Wales but became a separate part of the empire in 1841. Kazakhstan, meanwhile, was the last of the Soviet republics to declare independence, and has existed as a nation state only since 1991.