TV star Anneka Rice has revealed she was once arrested at the airport for carrying a live bullet in her bag.
The 65-year-old presenter has spoken out about numerous ‘dramatic’ occurrences that occurred on a family holiday to Croatia in 2015, one of which landed her in the hospital.
During a prior journey, Anneka even worried returning alive and prepared a message for her sons in case of disaster.
Her first trip to the European country had been for her long-running reality show Challenge Anneka, which saw her assigned tasks to perform in a limited period of time, frequently for a humanitarian reason.
In one episode, the Treasure Hunt actress helped a Croatian village rebuild itself after the Homeland War, which put her in such danger that she wrote a message for her boys in case she never returned.
‘It was a desecrated country,’ Anneka recalled, speaking on the Wine Times podcast.
After watching the episode recently on YouTube, the mum-of-two revealed: ‘I told my sons that what you didn’t know when I was filming that is I left a note in my hotel to you in case I didn’t make it out alive because we were in a post-war, but there were still snipers.’
New Wine Times podcast launches today. Will Lyons &I are off to Croatia. I’ve been twice.I had snipers trained on me the 1st time. Ended up in A&E & arrested at the airport for having a Kalashnikov bullet in my handbag the 2nd. You? Hope you enjoy it! https://t.co/7hxeN2UgdV pic.twitter.com/IuUKVqgstb
— Anneka Rice (@AnnekaRice) November 7, 2023
‘We were under protection,’ she continued, recalling the fear.
‘I had a real moment of whether I’d get home.’
Her family excursion to Croatia two decades later had equally frightening incidents.
‘I saw Croatia at a very low ebb and it seemed very surreal two decades later as a family to go on a boat trip around the island, which sounds weird to even say that in the same sentence,’ she went on.
‘It’s a surreal juxtaposition.’
During a family vacation, a tour guide presented Anneka with a bullet from the Homeland War, also known as the Croatian War of Independence, which lasted from 1991 to 1995.
‘A live bullet he gave me, and I just put it in my handbag,’ she said, confirming she was later arrested at the airport, but let free thanks to a stroke of luck.
‘It showed up on security, they found a live bullet in my handbag and I didn’t know what to say!
‘I was separated, my kids had to wave me off, I was taken off, I was searched, I was questioned, and honestly it was only because it was a Sunday, because eventually a woman came out and said, “You’re very lucky it is a Sunday because we’re going to let you go, because we want to go home now.”‘
‘So I associate Croatia with quite a lot of drama.’
The drama continued when Anneka was brought to the hospital during the family trip, as she mentioned elsewhere on the podcast.
‘The inevitable happened, I fell off the moped and had quite a bad accident,’ she began.
‘Slightly concussed, I came to on the roadside with my two sons [saying] “Mum we love you, stay with us,” and honestly I was fine but I kept it going for slightly longer because I was just loving it.
‘It was the most spiritual experience I ever had,’ she laughed, adding that she ‘milked it for a bit longer’ before being ‘patched up’ in the hospital.
