No, this isn't a clickbait headline; to my surprise, I genuinely did go back in time when I recently crossed the IDL, or International Date Line.
Despite a relatively short four hour flight that left New Zealand on a Saturday afternoon, I arrived in Rarotonga (in the Cook Islands) on the evening of Friday 25th, the DAY BEFORE I took off.
What I mean by this is that I spent the afternoon and evening of Friday 25th of January 2019 on the island of Waiheke in New Zealand, in a beautiful winery called the Mudbrick Vineyard, overlooking the coastline and city of Auckland.
I’m not exaggerating when I say it was scenic:
Despite this, I also spent the evening of Friday 25th January 2019 over 1,870 miles away, on the island of Rarotonga in the Cook Islands.
As it turns out, Rarotonga was perhaps even more beautiful:
This is because the International Date Line, which runs through the Pacific, essentially marks the ‘start’ and ‘finish’ points of the different time zones that wrap around the world.
According to timeanddate.com,
the 180° meridian was selected as the International Date Line because it mostly runs through the sparsely populated Central Pacific Ocean. It was decided at the International Meridian Conference in 1884 in Washington, D.C. where 26 countries attended.
If you think about it, it makes sense to have chosen a part of the world that is not hugely populated, minimising disruption across economies and those travelling between them.
Equally as strange is the experience when making the same journey in reverse: a four hour flight meant I lost an entire day. It's a strange thought to think that (short of any developments in genuine time travel), I will never in my life have lived the 2nd February 2019.
