One of the concepts that’s had my brain wrapped around a pole lately is the international date line. When working out times and flights to Sydney recently, I found it really difficult to calculate arrival times based on a 14-hour flight, a 17-hour time difference, and the fact that I was going to cross the date line and lose a day.
I usually find it dead simple to calculate time differences and arrivals when flying cross-country here in the US, or even trans-Atlantic flights to Europe. But thinking about the flight to Australia is equally throwing me for a loop and wildly fascinating to me at the same time.
I mentioned in my last post that I picked up a copy of Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country. I love Bryson’s writing style and his sense of humor. If you haven’t read anything by him, he gives wonderful, often hysterical, accounts of traveling abroad, and does it all in an easy to read narrative. He always manages to learn loads of interesting facts about each place before he gets there, and shares some of those facts throughout each book.
Sunburned Country covers his travels in Australia, a land he absolutely loves. Reading through the first chapters is getting me more and more excited about the trip.
On the topic of crossing the date line, I came across a couple of paragraphs of Bryson’s which encapsulate almost exactly what I’ve been thinking:
Each time you fly from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from you when you cross the international date line. I left Los Angeles on January 3 and arrived in Sydney fourteen hours later on January 5. For me there was no January 4. None at all. Where it went exactly I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that for one twenty-four-hour period in the history of earth, it appears I had no being.
I find it a little uncanny, to say the least. I mean to say, if you were browsing through your ticket folder and you saw a notice that said, “Passengers are advised that on some crossings twenty-four-hour loss of existence may occur” (which is, of course, how they would phrase it, as if it happened from time to time), you would probably get up and make inquiries, grab a sleeve, and say, “Excuse me.” There is, it must be said, a certain metaphysical comfort in knowing that you can cease to have material form and it doesn’t hurt at all, and, to be fair, they do give you back the day on the return journey when you cross the date line in the opposite direction and thereby manage somehow to arrive in Los Angeles before you left Sydney, which in its way, of course, is an even neater trick.
From In a Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson
I leave on September 26 from Los Angeles, exactly as Bryson did. I fly for fourteen hours. I arrive in Sydney on September 28. For me, there will be no September 27, 2004. It will never exist. Or in Bryson’s words… I won’t exist on that date. Thank goodness that’s not my birthday.
You know what’s really screwy? That return trip thing. When I look at my return date on my Palm, my arrival at LAX (11:15am) happens before my departure in Sydney (2:50pm) on the same day. It’s actually making the little Palm app I use to manage travel schedules freak out, not to mention my brain. Whacked, I tell you!
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I was hiking in the mountains of British Columbia with some friends. We had come from a town in the west, in the Pacific time zone, and when we arrived at the summit we met another group of hikers that had come from the east, in the Mountain time zone one hour ahead. My friend remarked, “ooo, you guys are from the future.”
For more metaphysical fun with time zones and the international date line, definitely read Umberto Eco’s most excellent novel The Island of the Day Before.
(Bonus: You’ll also learn how God managed to find all the water for the forty days and nights of rain during the Deluge.)
^__^ imagine what it was when one took the Concorde from Paris to New York and arrived 1 hour ( in local time ) before his departure.
Eerie, but true: I have friends that crossed the date line from September 10th, 2001 over to September 12th, 2001.
When thinking about the time difference between Australia and the US, I’ve always thought about it in terms of minimum time zone separation.
That is, the difference between Sydney and my time zone, CDT, is nine hours. Sydney is nine hours behind CDT and a day later. For me, this makes the math a little easier.
Of course, that doesn’t always mean that it is a different date in Sydney. For instance, 3am in CDT is 6pm in Sydney on the same day.
And the math changes depending on what time of year it is. Currently we are on Daylight Saving Time in the US and Sydney is not.
And then, of course, there are places like Adelaide, which is a half hour off.
I suppose it is better to just not think about it very much.
“When I look at my return date on my Palm, my arrival at LAX (11:15am) happens before my departure in Sydney (2:50pm) on the same day”
I think it was Steven Wright who had an old joke about how great this is when coming back across the dateline. If you land in LAX and notice you forgot anything, you can just call yourself in Sydney and remind yourself to get it before you leave. :)
Actually, you /might/ exist in that day if you happen to just be on one side of the IDL after midnight … but I’ll grant you that it is a bit wacky.
As for the arrive-before-you-left thing, I have this happen all the time. The Georgia-Alabama state line is the demarcator for switching from Eastern to Central time, and it’s just a 35-40 minute hop from ATL to HSV. More than once I have arrived at home in Huntsville “before” I left Atlanta. The flight attendants usually make a good joke about it before takeoff.
Wow, September 27th is MY birthday. :) I’ll be thinking of your temporary non-being as I celebrate. Best wishes for your safe return to the realm of physical existence.
If you work in GMT (or UTC or whatever it’s called now) it’s much easier. It’s even easier for Kiwis as we are GMT+12 so 2.15 is 2.15, just with am and pm switched.
Several years ago, on a flight from Honolulu to Sydney, I _did_ miss my birthday! Does that makes me a year younger than it states in my passport, or what?!
Weird. January 4th is my birthday.
You don’t need to fly across the ocean to experience time travel. The flight from Detroit to Milwaukee ends a few minutes before it begins.
What’s rather freaky is watching the “flight progress” on the monitors on your flight. They show you where you are, local time, time at destination, where the “day break” line is in relation to your flight (ie, the sun has come up at what place), etc. When I try to call friends in Australia, I constantly get messed up trying to compensate for the difference. Luckily, I have a clock with multiple time zones to keep me sane.
gb: I’m lucky to have a little world clock on my Palm too, which instantly tells me what time it is in several cities. I sense that it’s going to be quite useful when I’m traveling in AUS.
So if you immediately get back on a plane in Syndey on September 28th and fly back to, say Hawaii, would you then get to the 27th?
You will get a Groundhog Day experience on the way back when you have a verrry long day.
and… sept. 11 is MY birthday.
i was living on guam in 2001.
so the wtc terrorist attacks happened on the 12th for me…
I know what you mean! I just came back from India which is 11.5 hours ahead of home (Denver, CO). Yes, their time zone is 1/2 hour off from the normal 1-hour intervals, which was a little odd as well.
I lost the day on the way over there, but it didn’t feel as strange as it sounded before the flight. I think it’s because I spent soooo much time on the plane, it kind of felt like I should have lost a day.
On the way back, I had the longest Friday of my life. We left India at 2am and arrived in Denver at 4pm that same day. How did I have over 18 hours in the air plus a 6 hour layover in Frankfurt and still get home on the same day?!?!
When Michael Palin (of Monty Python fame) did one of his
“around some part of the world according to a theme” programmes, he got on a ship in Japan to Los Angeles (if I remeber correctly). It was his birthday on the day they passed the dateline. So he had his birthday for two days. He found it all very boring ;-)
Doug, the same thing happens to me when I travel to Korea (I’ve gone twice now). The first time, I left on April 29th and arrived on May 1. But my birthday is April 30. I missed it entirely, so it’s funny that you mention, “Thank goodness that’s not my birthday.” On the otherhand, I suppose I can rightfully claim to be a year younger than I actually am, since I never had the birthday. Perhaps I should fly to Korea on April 29 every year. Perhaps I’m found a metaphysical loophole for eternal youth . . . ;)
I once hopped and skipped my way across the Pacific, heading east all the time. The great thing was that I found myself with an extra day of vacation. Unfortunately, I also had an extra day of hotel fees!
“There once was a girl named Brite, who traveled at the speed of light. She left one day, in a Relativist way, and returned home the previous night.”
See you in SF when you get back, because of course I’m going to pull my own little disappearing act…
Many years ago, prior to the collapse of the Iron Curtain, I had some fun with Daylight Savings Time and travelling around between Eastern and Western Europe. Not all the countries had their DST on the same day. Apparently, the way EuroRail handles this is to shunt the train off to a side line and let it sit there for an hour so the train arrives on time. For us passengers who were sleeping at the time, no time was lost or gained, but all our watches magically jumped forward by one hour. Or backwards? So I guess our watches got to experience time travel.
I have had 4 pacific trips. Fun!
Dont worry you get sometime back on the way back!
This discussion including mentions of Australia, date lines, and September 11th reminded me of my own eerie experience with same.
My wife and I were married on 2001-09-01, and left for our honeymoon in Sydney, Australia (and ultimately New Zealand) on 2001-09-08 from LAX. Our first full day in Sydney was September 11th (local time, September 10th in the States).
That night, at an Internet cafe, I composed a long email back to friends and family to tell them we’d arrived okay and giving a brief synopsis of our trip so far. I closed my email with the line “That’s it from the future: September 11th was great; I’m sure all of you will love it too.”
Definitely one of the odder things I’ve ever written. Stupid date line…
As for my advice on what to see: definitely go to New Zealand, and definitely plan at least a week. I’m a South Island man myself—more remote, more mountainous. (Stay at the Villa Sorgenfrei B&B in Queenstown, a great place—if it’s still there.) But I enjoyed parts of the North Island as well. “Blackwater rafting” (tubing and rafting on underwater rivers through caves) in Waitomo was amazing—check it out.
Joe
Well, revel in the knowledge that, while you may never experience september 27th, you will get to experience the same day twice on the way back, you will be in the same timeframe twice at the same time, you will get what most people desire most, a second chance. You can relive that day and make better decisions.
For example, if you’re on the plane and they offer you, as an example, chicken or pork, you go with pork and decide it was a bad one, when you relive that day, and become faced with the same decision you will know, in complete confidence, that it’s chicken all the way.
“Thank goodness that date’s not my birthday”
When I was younger I actually flew from Australia to the U.S on my birthday. I was able to celebrate my 14th birthday twice. At that age it was actually pretty cool. Now how old am I again… ;-)
Welcome to Aus! I live in Sydney, so I would like to be able to go to WE04, but I can’t afford to go :-(. Anyway, be sure to drop in for a coffee while your here :-)
Ah! I was confused. Over here in Blighty, that book is called ‘Down Under’, as we think of Australia as the bottom of the world, and ourselves the top (geographically speaking). Likewise, ‘I’m a Stranger Here Myself’ is ‘Notes From a Big Country’ in Englanf.
These little details confuse me as much as international dateline shennanigens.
Hey, do you Americans ever get annoyed that you’re pretty much the last people in the world to get each day?
Small Paul: Hey, do you Americans ever get annoyed that you’re pretty much the last people in the world to get each day?
Never thought of it that way. But it’s pretty funny now that you point it out.
Ideally, I’d say that by the time our day comes around, we get to learn from all of your mistakes each day. But obviously we’re not proving that much lately…
Happy “Doug Doesn’t Exist Day” everybody!
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