A KIWI tourist says she was detained in Kazakhstan after immigration officials refused to believe New Zealand was a country, insisting it was actually a state of Australia.

Chloe Phillips-Harris, 28, arrived at Kazakhstan’s Almaty Airport in May after being assured by the New Zealand embassy she would be able to enter the Central Asian country on her Kiwi passport.

But officials at the airport told her she wouldn’t be able to enter the country without an Australian passport, the New Zealand Herald reported.

“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,” Ms Phillips-Harris told the Herald.

“They said New Zealand’s clearly a part of Australia.”

Ms Phillips-Harris said New Zealand was missing from a map of the world in the room she was interrogated in, which made it impossible for her to convince Kazakhstan immigration officials that her home country really existed.

She said she realised too late she probably had to pay her way out of the tricky situation.

“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,” Ms Phillips-Harris said.

She said she was interrogated for hours and locked in a guard room for a day and a half.

“It was an empty room with a bed basically,” she said. “I didn’t get any food or water but in the middle of the night they guards clearly felt sorry for me so once immigration police and everyone had gone, the guards would sneak me a drink.

“The guards were really nice and let me wander around the immigration room as long as they were no flights coming in, and if there was a flight they would just shoo me back into the room.”

Eventually, with the help of contacts in Kazakhstan, Ms Phillips was able to secure a new visa, a US passport and an exchange of cash that allowed her to escape detention and enter the country, where she ended up staying for six months.

“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,” she said.

Ms Phillips-Harris said despite the ordeal she still hoped to return to Kazakhstan, where the strengthening economy and breathtaking mountains — not to mention a brand-new McDonalds restaurant — were attracting more and more adventurous tourists.

“[Kazakhstan] is changing very fast, there’s a huge amount of potential over there,” she said.

“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.”

A spokesman for New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade told the Herald it was aware of the case and it had been resolved.