If she turned down the makers of Trouble in Paradise, a new docu-drama about travellers thrust into life-and-death situations, who would blame her? But she didn’t.

“I was happy to do it,” Daisy, 23, said.

“I couldn’t have done it this time last year. I just wouldn’t have been ready. But now I’ve dealt with it, and I think it’s important to tell people. This could happen anywhere.”

Last March, Daisy worked for a Tuncurry travel agency. She went on a fact-finding trip to the China in the north-western Shaanxi province, and her group boarded a bus after wandering through the ancient capital Xian.

But no-one realised that a man, later identified as recently laid-off aerospace worker Xia Tao, had followed them. Xia got on the bus too.

“He took off his jacket,” Daisy said afterwards, “and he had a detonator. It looked like a mobile phone and he had wires running up his arms. He used a lighter to melt away the wires’ rubber casing to show everything was connected. I thought, We’re being hijacked. Oh my God.”

The group’s Chinese tour guides and some of the tourists negotiated the release of the hostages, before a police sniper shot Xia dead as he tried to drive the now empty bus to the airport.

Flash forward 15 months, and Daisy’s escape will be re-enacted tomorrow night on TV.

“I honestly felt fine about the whole thing. I think going overseas for eight months really helped.”

Not knowing if she wanted to stay in the industry or even keep living in Forster, Daisy toured Spain, France, Croatia, Italy, Germany, Poland, the UK and the USA.

“I had to learn to trust complete strangers again,” she said.

“I wasn’t constantly paranoid and looking over my shoulder, but I was a lot more careful. Probably always will be. That’s the nature of the beast, if you’ve been through something.”

She decided she had to get on a bus.

The moment came on sparkling day in Barcelona, with tourists and cameras and people everywhere. No-one felt the undercurrent of menace from the act of showing a ticket and sitting down, except two people.