In the case of Kiritamati and Tarawa, they were divided by a whole, unambiguous day. The International Date Line is one of the messier reminders that the time we set our watches by is not preordained but rather an ingenious human construct. This wasn’t just a matter of a few hours, either. The trouble was their new additions were the other side of the International Date Line which meant that when it was, say, Saturday in Tarawa, which is the most heavily-populated of the Kiribati atolls, it would be Friday on Kiritimati (also known as Christmas Island) in the Line Islands to the east.

When Kiribati was granted sovereignty over the Line Islands in 1979, shortly after itself gaining independence from the United Kingdom, it found they posed a chronological puzzle. Kiribati’s territory incorporates three distinct groups of islands: sixteen Gilbert Islands roughly halfway between Hawaii and Papua New Guinea, eight Phoenix Islands in the seas north of Samoa, and eight Line Islands, not too far from Tuvalu. These rarest of time zones were established by Kiribati, on an entirely unilateral basis, on 31 December 1994, for the purpose of removing certain absurdities from the daily lives of its citizens. That rectangle represents two time zones, GMT+14 and GMT+13 (note: I’m using GMT, or Greenwich Mean Time here, which may be to do with my London childhood but it’s also increasingly referred to by the initials UTC or Universal Time, Coordinated). This is the International Date Line: trace it to the point where it’s interrupted from its simple trajectory and cuts out dramatically to the right, forming the shape of a kind of sideways ‘T’. To find Kiribati, first find a bold north-south line cutting through the Pacific Ocean. Ever in pursuit of a challenge though, let’s not let that stop us… Kiribati is also one of the few places in the world to straddle all four hemispheres, which means that, because its habitable land consists of just thirty-three delicate atolls ( ring-shaped coral reef islands – could it get more romantic?) it can be rather hard to locate on a map. Fittingly, its flag depicts a sun rising perpetually above the waves. You can think of Kiribati as the eternal land of tomorrow: if it’s Sunday where you are, it’s probably Monday in Kiribati. Kiribati – pronounced Kiribas – is the only nation on Earth to permanently trespass into GMT+14: the earliest time zone in the world. Every day has to start somewhere, and that somewhere is always the same: it’s the island republic of Kiribati, a vast constellation of atolls dispersed across 1.4 million square miles of Pacific Ocean.

Gmt time zone now