The International Date Line

Yas and I were examining a map of Samoa in a restaurant yesterday at lunch, rooting out the best locations to explore on our loop around Savai’i, the country’s Northern island. The west tip of the island is the last place on Earth to see the sunset of each given day, I read. Well, that was just mind-boggling. The map showed the international date line to curve around the west of Samoa’s two islands, suggesting we had indeed crossed it flying from New Zealand as my father so enthusiastically pointed out during a Skype call. Yet something didn’t add up: New Zealand is only an hour behind Samoa and certainly not a day ahead, or behind for that matter. We felt too unsure to challenge the map and lacked the means to look it up, which in hindsight is what made this matter all the more grasping. My phone is equipped with a world clock, enabling me to find out the exact time anywhere on the globe, the key to unboggling the mind.

If the date line was marked wrong on the map, then all we had to do was locate the point on Earth that is exactly 24 hours behind Samoa. Los Angeles, 21 hours behind Samoa; Honolulu and the Cook Islands, 24. In my head, Samoa and American Samoa, a tiny island to the Southeast, had to be in the same time zone, the international date line was bound to skirt around the three islands to the East. For certainty’s sake I typed in Pago Pago, American Samoa. Well, it was 1:37 pm there and 2:37 pm here, except in Pago Pago it was the 13th March and we were on the 14th. We were silent for a time, while the fact that a 40 minute flight would take us back a more than a day sunk in. Should I travel to Pago Pago from Apia, my diary would have two entries for the same date, and then skip a date on the day I came back. I could have two birthdays if I made that trip, the 22nd in Samoa and the 22nd in Pago Pago, add to that the bucket-list worthy crossing of the international date line. That conversation lit the three of us up like pink lightbulbs while we had our cheese toasties.

At dinner we questioned our waiter about the international date line. Were we witnessing the last sunset of the 14th March or the first? Had the USA, in its ambition to be on the border of the line, inched it across? As it turns out, Samoa’s main trade relations being with New Zealand and Australia, the country itself decided in 2011 that it was in their advantage to move the line across and be in synch, and thus removed the 30th December from its calendar. The dateline is not defined by international law so countries are free to choose the date and time zone they want to observe.

We appreciated the sunset that much more, knowing that we were the first on Earth to admire its beauty.

Sascha xx