Kazakhstan border officials claim New Zealand isn’t a “real” country.
Come on Kazakhstan, you may have inspired Borat but your geography is terrible! At least when it comes to border officials…
In late 2016, a Kiwi traveller was supposedly detained on the grounds that her passport wasn’t linked to a “real” country. Yep, border officials refused to believe that New Zealand was a nation in itself, and instead insisted that it was a state in Australia.
After touching down at Kazakhstan’s Almaty Airport, Kiwi traveller Chloe Phillips-Harris explained to the New Zealand Herald that she was confronted by border officials. As an intrepid traveller, she even checked with the NZ embassy prior to her trip, to make sure she could enter Kazakhstan on a Kiwi passport.
But when she got to immigration, things didn’t run to plan.
“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,” she explained in an interview with the Herald. “They said New Zealand’s clearly a part of Australia.”
Uh oh…
She was then whisked away to an immigration room, where an oversized world map was hanging on the wall. Unfortunately, the map had vetoed the Land of the Long White Cloud, so Phillips-Harris wasn’t able to point out where she was from.
“Plain-clothes policemen got involved, immigration police got involved, airport officials got involved,” she recalls.
Bribes and border crossings
It turns out that ultimately, the accusation was all part of a grand scheme to score a bribe. It’s not uncommon for border officials to unnecessarily detain travellers, in the hope that they’ll receive a little cash on the side for smoothing things over.
Her story has a happy ending though, as after being detained for almost two days Phillips-Harris was welcomed to Kazakhstan for six months. But that’s not to say that cash didn’t exchange hands…
“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 to the paper.
Despite her negative experience and the blatant bribes that exchange hands at the airport, Phillips-Harris maintains that her experience was positive.
“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,” she said.
When asked for a comment by the Herald, a spokesman for New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade confirmed that they were aware of the case, and had successfully resolved the issue.
It’s fantastic to see Kiwis globetrotting to offbeat destinations like Kazakhstan, but when it comes to being detained on the grounds that New Zealand isn’t a real country, this particular ‘stan’ has some serious geography homework to do. Or, simply needs to clean up its immigration act. There are a time and a place for bribes Kazakhstan, and airport immigration isn’t one of them!