Travel hits and misses: David Lomas hosts Lost & Found

Despite a rocky past, David Lomas now loves to holiday in Fiji's Yasawa Islands. Photo / Getty Images

HIT

I was on a 60 Minutes assignment to Afghanistan in 1996 to visit Bob McKerrow, the Kiwi running the Red Cross in Kabul while it was under siege by the Taliban. Reporter Ross Stevens and cameraman Ken Dorman were with me.

I was amazed at how Bob nonchalantly dismissed incoming rocket fire as we filmed. We saw horrible things; the worst was children screaming with legs blown off by landmines. On the front line we watched Taliban and government forces exchange tank fire. Scary stuff.

We headed back to Peshawar, Pakistan, and then — on a rattling Pakistan Airlines Fokker Friendship, which had prayers chanting out over the speakers as we took off — to Karachi.

After four days of sleeping on floors and no showers, our reward was to be an unheard-of Business Class seat to our next story, an interview with a Kiwi hitman in a Dutch prison.

But when we got to Karachi, KLM told us we'd been off-loaded because we had not confirmed our seats three days in advance. They failed to understand it was impossible confirming seats from a city under siege. We were put up in a dubious hotel and then were flown to Amsterdam cattle-class on Lufthansa. I wrote a stinging complaint to KLM that Ross read and laughed at. But then, three days later, when we boarded our flight from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv to interview Yair Hirschfeld, the one-time Kiwi who brokered the then Norway Middle-East peace accord, we were sitting right up the front — as we were for the rest of our journey home to New Zealand. KLM was forgiven. A distinct hit out of a disaster.

Dinner at the only 'restaurant' in Kabul on 60 Minutes shoot. Left to right: the late Ross Stevens (reporter), David Lomas (producer), Ken Dorman (cameraman). Photo / Supplied

MISS

Fiji was my childhood-home so I was stunned when I was detained on arrival at Suva airport for being an undesirable person. My problem was I'd interviewed one-time coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka a few years earlier after he'd threatened another coup.

My detention came when I'd headed back to Fiji to do an extraordinary swapped-at-birth story where an ethnic Fjian mother had taken home from hospital an ethnic Indian child, and vice versa.

No amount of talking would get me in to Fiji. I was detained with an armed guard till the next departure to New Zealand.

Then, when everyone was on board, I was marched on with my armed escorts. As I was walked to the back row with the eyes of every other passenger on me. I felt like I was a deported paedophile.

My redemption came when a few minutes after we were in the air the captain of the Fiji Airways plane called over the loudspeaker and asked "Mr David Lomas" to join him in the cockpit. My fellow passengers were totally confused. The pilot and a couple of the stewardesses were old family friends. My brother Peter was editor of the main Fiji paper, the Fiji Sun. Its headline the next day: Lomas Deported. I was later apologised to — and I am again a frequent traveller to fabulous Fiji to visit family and to relax in the beautiful Yasawa Islands.

David Lomas hosts Lost & Found, Mondays, 8.30pm on Three.