Can anyone say for sure whether or not New Zealand is really its own country and not just a distant, unpopular state of Australia? Yes, they can, because it is – but I’ll be damned if I ever acknowledge it. It turns out Kazakhstan feels much the same.

Kiwi traveller Chloe Phillips-Harris was detained in the country for a day and a half in May by airport officials who insisted that New Zealand was in Australia and she would require an Aussie passport to enter the country.

Apparently, her insistence that New Zealand is actually, in fact, a country was made difficult by the fact that it wasn’t on the map of the world they had in the interrogation room:

“I landed in Kazakhstan on the last flight of the night, and I got to an immigration booth and they asked me for an Australian passport, and told me I couldn’t come in without an Australian passport. They said New Zealand’s clearly a part of Australia.

“Plainclothes policemen got involved, immigration police got involved, airport officials got involved … and at that stage it was a bit late to bribe my way out, which apparently is what I was supposed to do from the beginning, but being a New Zealander we’re not familiar with that.”

She managed to get out of the situation by getting some friends in the country to help her secure a US passport and a new visa:

“The people I knew in Kazakhstan got me a new type of visa and paid the right people and got me out, that’s probably the easiest explanation.”

Chloe isn’t holding a grudge against Borat‘s country of origin, though:

“It’s is changing very fast, there’s a huge amount of potential over there. “It is corrupt and there are problems there but there are a lot of good people there too, it’s just a beautiful country to be in. It’s just really unfortunate there was a world map that didn’t have New Zealand on it.”

Very nice.

Source: News.com.au.

Photo: Flight Of The Conchords.