Austronesia   Austro-what? Warezat? Is it near Vienna? You mean we have another new country now? Has the Travelers Century Club heard about this one yet and added it to its list?

Calm down. It’s not a country, and the TCC needn’t worry. It’s a geographic term. I only learned about it myself in the last year, and as I see what it’s all about I find it’s a fascinating concept, particularly now as we extend our knowledge from Hawai‘i further south across the Pacific. Let’s start by grouping similar names together.

Some travelers to Asia talk about the ‘Stans. This is an easy concept for people investigating the countries of Central Asia such as Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and others, even Afghanistan and Pakistan can be included to summarize the countries named in this manner. I have never visited any of the ‘Stans.

Now let’s talk about the ‘Nesias. We have Indonesia and Polynesia as familiar ones to start out with, and others. The ‘Nesias can be actual countries, or otherwise just geographic groupings. Austronesia is one of the latter. It is a geographic grouping, not for geologic reasons such as volcanic origin, but for ethnic reasons. The people in Austronesia are related ethnically, and have similar languages, a point that almost always goes along with ethnicity.

Let’s take the word apart, and we can play a little with Greek first, which we did a little earlier with when talking about Cyrillic (also about Sherlock Holmes). Let’s look at the Greek word νησος, or all in capitals, ΝΗΣΟΣ. If you know Greek letters at all, sometimes from fraternity or sorority names, you may recognize Nu, Eta, Sigma, Omicron, Sigma. Put ‘em together and we have nesos or NESOS, which means “island”.

[Comments in an aside: Nu is more recognizable as a capital. Omicron is a no-brainer either way. Sigma is more recognizable in its capital form as a math symbol. Notice lower-case Sigma has two forms, a regular one for the beginning or middle of a word, and a special form for the end. This squiggly lower-case end-Sigma might slightly strike you (I hope) as resembling the S in our Latin alphabet.]

If you combine the root of nesos with the suffix –ia (as in California, Nigeria), you get ‘Nesia, which we could translate as “island-land” or, if it’s not really a country, “island-place”. So Polynesia is Many-Island-Place and Indonesia is India-Island-Land.

[I cannot leave this last name standing without discussion, so here comes another digression. Why India? “Why India” indeed. It made me start thinking about the ancient world. To the ancients in Europe, what did Asia consist of? China and India. Japan was next to unknown at this time, as was southeast Asia.

China was reached by land from Europe over the Silk Road, and had been since Marco Polo. It wasn’t until Japan was opened up in the mid 1800’s that the so-called China Trade (by sea) became important, so for this discussion of islands, which implies access by sea, we’re left with just India. India was that part of Asia reachable by sea around Africa, as we discussed recently about the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Town (2008/9). (I would assume the Himalayas were too high for easy access by land from Europe.) Thus, India was the major sea goal from Europe, which would account for the fact that the body of water east of Africa, south of Asia and west of Indonesia and Australia is called the Indian Ocean (African Ocean? Asian Ocean? Australian Ocean? No, they were headed to India and named it after their destination).

When Columbus sailed westward, his goal was to reach nothing other than India, resulting in native Americans being called Indians in English. Think of this: if his goal had been China, native Americans might have been called Chinese. Far fetched? Yes, but now think again about them being called Indians. (“Cowboys and Chinese” is just as improbable as “Cowboys and Indians” should really be.)

The islands now comprising Indonesia were then called the Indies, again a reference to India, which is not all that close, but perhaps also a reference to the Indian Ocean that these islands bordered. The Caribbean islands later became known as the West Indies, so the Indies had to be renamed the East Indies. Was Indonesia named as it was because of India, because of the Indian Ocean, or because it had been the Indies? Probably a little of each, but now we can see more depth in the name Indonesia.]

OK, now that we’re more comfortable with the ‘Nesias, let’s go back to Austronesia. Austro- comes from the Latin word australis “southern” (as used in the name Australia), so Austronesia would mean “Southern-Island-Area”. Now we’re getting closer, so it’s time to jump to the bottom line, then work our way back.

Austronesia refers to all the islands in the Indian Ocean, Indonesia, and most of the Pacific Ocean. It’s a very big area. The “southern” in its name refers to the islands south of Asia, already meaning that the name is inaccurate, or incomplete, but given the size of the area we’re discussing, I can’t think of anything more accurate. We’re talking about islands in waters not only south of Asia as the name implies, but also east of Africa, east of Asia and north and east of Australia. What a territory!

But I still feel an objection arising. Why put all these apples and oranges together? Because they’re not apples and oranges. An alternate definition of Austronesia, perhaps more accurate than the geographic one (although the geographic one is easier to picture), is the ethno-cultural one: Austronesia is the homeland of the Austronesian languages, also called the Malayo-Polynesian language family. That’s right, what they speak in Madagascar is (distantly) related to what they speak in Hawai‘i.

Let’s do a quick review of our own language family, Indo-European. It’s original home territory covers Europe (Germanic, Italic [Romance], Russic [Slavic], others) and India-Persia. Of course, many of these languages have spread, such as Russian east to the Pacific, and English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French west to the Americas, South Pacific and beyond. However, we recognize this spreading, but just consider the original Indo-European turf. Well, the Malayo-Polynesian (Austronesian) language family of Austronesia covers half the globe. Its 1200 languages, which puts it on a par with Indo-European in number of languages, makes it one of the largest of the language families both for number of languages and geographic size.

Now that we’ve gone to the bottom line, let’s look at the geography of Austronesia once more, a little more carefully. We start with Madagascar, whose languages and cultures have nothing to do with nearby Africa. We include Mauritius and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, and even Sri Lanka. As we include Indonesia, and everything else between Asia and Australia, we find an odd curiosity. We said we are just including islands, but we find that the long and slender Malay Peninsula, which protrudes south from Asia and includes Malaysia and Singapore, is the only piece of any mainland territory that is included in Austronesia, but it’s odd shape and location in the middle of all these islands makes that understandable. We include the Philippines, Taiwan, and New Guinea, swing down to include New Zealand, and way over to include Rapa Nui (Easter Island), then all the islands on the way up to, and including Hawai‘i. This is indeed a vast territory, this area of the Malay-Polynesian (Austronesian) languages. It is also very important to note that Austronesia does NOT include the North Pacific, where there are few islands, anyway, so it does NOT include Japan or the Kuril or Aleutian Islands. It also does NOT include the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador. The Polynesians may have rowed their way north to Hawai‘i and incredibly, all the way east to Rapa Nui, a fact that is amazing enough, but they never did get to the Galapagos.

But now we need clarifications. While Indo-European languages come from the two places the name suggests, we know they’ve spread around the earth, so we have to recognize the historic location, then admit expansion. It’s the same with the Malayo-Polynesian languages: we accept their historic location, but then admit the changes that have taken place, include other languages overlaying Malayo-Polynesian territory. This is true in many places, but I’ll cite the most blatant examples.

Let’s start with what we’ve already discussed earlier. English overwhelms Hawaiian in Hawai‘i, yet we still recognize Hawaiian as belonging to the Malayo-Polynesian language family. English overwhelms Maori (but to a lesser extent) in New Zealand, yet Maori is still there. Similarly, Spanish rules in Rapa Nui, which is part of Chile, French in Tahiti and its nearby islands, Hindi, surprisingly, is spoken in half of Fiji, English and Chinese compete with Malay in Singapore, yet all the local languages still fit into this family. There are still remnants of Dutch in Indonesia, as well. In Sri Lanka, today only the miniscule Malay population shows the heritage, since Tamil and other languages coming from India have taken over the island, and of course, Taiwan is a Chinese-speaking island, and has been since the Han Chinese took over the island in the 17C, yet there are still Taiwanese Aborigines (2% of the population) who speak an Austronesian language. This list is not exhaustive, but we have to maintain our concept of original Austronesian territory, even if other languages are superimposed on the local language.

Now we can start to simplify what we’re particularly interested in by making the separation that the name Malayo-Polynesian indicates, into Malay and Polynesian, and for these two subdivisions we can use the family analogy I used with Indo-European languages. We can say that the Malay languages are siblings, and the Polynesian languages are siblings, and the relation between the two sub-groups is one of cousins. A parallel example in Indo-European would be to say that German and Swedish are siblings, French and Portuguese are siblings, but Swedish and Portuguese are cousins.

In analyzing this information, I find one fact I discover is more amazing than the next. Where would you imagine Malayo-Polynesian languages originated? Where did each subdivision spread to? How would you imagine each subdivision compares with the other in size? Don’t even guess, since you will be as amazed as I was, I’m sure. Hold onto your hat.

PLACE OF ORIGIN All these languages, and we’re talking about ‘Nesias, so these are all island languages, originated, appropriately, on an island. The homeland of Austronesian is prehistoric Taiwan, of all places. One source I found suggested three related Austronesian language varieties started there; two died out, and the third spread across Austronesia. Just picture the canoes spreading people from island to island.

DIRECTION OF SPREAD The rule of thumb is that Malay went (south and) WEST, Polynesian went EAST. From Taiwan Malay went down to the Philippines and to the many islands of Indonesia (but NOT New Guinea), then to the Malay Peninsula, then crossed the Indian Ocean to Madagascar and all points in between.

Generally, Polynesian went from Taiwan to the many islands of the Pacific; to Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia proper; it covered from New Guinea to New Zealand to Hawai‘i to Rapa Nui, but we’ll discuss all that in greater detail in a moment.

[I’ll include here a trivial point in order to give full and complete disclosure. The westernmost part of Micronesia, the part closest to Asia and just off the Philippines, includes two Malay, and not Polynesian languages. Palauan is spoken in Palau, and Chamorro is spoken in Guam and the Northern Marianas. Therefore, the languages of Guam and Hawai‘i will not be as similar as those of, say, Tahiti and Hawai‘i.]

COMPARATIVE SIZE There are about 500 Malay languages, or about 42% of the Malayo-Polynesian total, and about 700 Polynesian languages, or about 58%. These high totals on each side indicates that we are talking about languages spoken on islands, usually isolated from each other, and therefore conducive to growing apart into new languages.

But that just indicates variety of languages. What’s important is number of speakers, and you can’t imagine figures being more out of balance than these. There are 300 million speakers of Malay languages and only 2 million speakers of Polynesian languages. Those translate to percentages of 99.3% as opposed to 0.7%. Seeing this, the fact that there are more Polynesian languages than Malay really seems peculiar. But then Indonesia, say, has some very large islands, while Oceania has about 10,000 tiny islands spread far apart from each other. It works out that in Oceania there is an average of one language for every 1500 people.

For instance, look at the many speakers of these Malay languages on large islands: Javanese (on Java) 75 million, Indonesian 23 million, Malay (in Malaysia) 17 million, Tagalog [ta.GA.log] (in the Philippines) 16 million, Malagasy (in Madagascar) 6 million, Balinese (on Bali) 4 million, and many more.

Now look at these few speakers of these Polynesian languages on their comparatively tiny islands: Samoan 371,000, Fijian 330,000, Tahitian 124,000, Tongan 105,000, Maori (in New Zealand) 70,000, Rapa Nui (on Rapa Nui / Easter Island) 3,500, Hawaiian 1,000, and many more.

[I do note that this source said there were 1,000 speakers of Hawaiian, while the source I used in the essay on the Hawaiian language (2008/22) said that over the last two decades, the number of Hawaiian speakers went from 2,000 to 8,000. My guess to explain the discrepancy is that it’s difficult to count speakers of a language under the thumb of English, and anyway, do you count only highly fluent speakers or include those with just a bit of knowledge? The point in any case is to compare Hawaiian with its sister languages to see how it’s such a low man on the totem pole.]

The Polynesian Branch--In Oceania   We’ll put the Malay branch aside now to concentrate on the Polynesian branch, and then reduce our circle of interest even further. But first we have to struggle with terminology.

Just as we have Germanic languages, and one of them is German, we have Malay languages, and one of them is Malay (see above). This can be misleading enough, but we also have the general Polynesian area described above, which is then further broken down into three areas, one of which is called Polynesia.

I’m tempted to delve right into Polynesian itself to help resolve this dilemma. How about calling the larger area Polynesia Nui? But no. Let’s use another current term, and call the larger “Polynesia” Oceania, which is then further broken down to Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia (proper). While the Malay language branch is located between Asia and Australia, plus in the Indian Ocean, the Polynesian branch in Oceania covers the huge swath of the Pacific we described earlier.

MICRONESIA To subdivide Oceania, let’s look first at the northwestern part of these Pacific islands. There are many, and they are small, and the name for this area picks up on the aspect of them being small, so it’s called Micronesia, or Small-Island-Place. (We pointed out earlier that Polynesia picks up on the “many” aspect, so that Polynesia is Many-Island-Place.) Micronesia includes many Polynesian languages plus the two Malay ones mentioned above (including in Guam). Some of its islands may appeal to WWII buffs, and the Travelers Century Club includes every political grouping of them on their lists, but given the difficulty of reaching these islands, and my lack of interest in them, they are not a destination for me.

MELANESIA The second area is in the southwestern part of the Pacific, which is called Melanesia. The prefix comes from the Greek word for black (which also appears in “melanoma”), and refers to the fact that the peoples here are darker-skinned than others in the Pacific. One accounting for this will be explained in a moment. In any case, Melanesia includes one very large island, New Guinea. The fact that the western half of New Guinea is part of Indonesia is of no importance—this is not a Malay area as the other islands of Indonesia are. As for visiting Melanesia, New Guinea attracts visitors for its primitive people, and interesting flora and fauna, but I’m afraid I’m not interested. Other parts of Melanesia also include places of WWII significance, including the Solomon Islands. But the only area of Melanesia that I want to visit is Fiji, and I will on this trip. Fortunately it’s way on the eastern side of Melanesia, adjacent to Polynesia, and it’s an odd curiosity that a couple of tiny islands that belong to Fiji are actually part of Polynesia. But Fiji is one of my goals.

POLYNESIA In the south-central Pacific is the ‘Nesia that everyone wants to go see, the one that James Michener wrote about in his Pulitzer-Prize winning collection of short stories, Tales of the South Pacific, and that Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote the musical South Pacific about: Polynesia. It is easy to identify on the map, since it’s known as the Polynesian Triangle. On the map connect Hawai‘i in the north with Rapa Nui in the southeast with New Zealand in the southwest and there you have the Polynesian Triangle. In the center of the Triangle are well-known places such as the Samoas, Tonga, and Tahiti with its surrounding islands, including Bora Bora. (Seeing the Polynesian reduplication in a Hawaiian name such as Kamehameha, how could you doubt that the reduplication in the Tahitian name Bora Bora is Polynesian?) The Polynesian Triangle is my principal destination on this trip.

Now that we’ve located and discussed the three subdivisions of the Polynesian branch within Oceania, I want to cite some interesting information that appeared in the New York Times just a year ago, on 18 January 2008. It concerns a new genetic study to determine and track ethnicity in Oceania. DNA was studied and analyzed from 1,000 individuals from 41 Pacific populations, and it was determined that Melanesians are indeed different from Micronesians and Polynesians, having almost no genetic relationship with them. It also showed that Micronesians and Polynesians were more closely related to Taiwan Aborigines than the Melanesians were.

The earlier theory had been that some Melanesians had slowly ventured further afield in their outrigger canoes to become Micronesians and Polynesians. The new theory on emigration out of Taiwan is then this: the Melanesians probably arrived on their islands 35 THOUSAND years ago, while the Micronesians and Polynesians passed through and proceeded on as far as to Hawai‘i and Rapa Nui only 35 HUNDRED years ago. The new “overwhelming biological evidence” is that Micronesians and Polynesians came directly from Taiwan to their present locations, at most moving through Melanesia very rapidly. They only intermixed to a modest degree with local Melanesian populations, without having any significant cultural or genetic contacts. Thus while they all were migrating seafarers coming from the same Taiwanese Austronesian source, this evidence would account for additional ethnic differences and language variations among the Melanesians as opposed to the other two groups.

This Trip   Again given that travel between so many disparate islands is difficult and expensive, there are a couple of places I chose not to go to. Tonga is well-known as the place where they are very generous to their king, but I didn’t feel there was much there I wanted to see. Also recommended is the island of Raratonga in the Cook Islands, but its beauty is described in its beaches, and I suspect I’ll be seeing enough of that. Similarly, some of the outer islands of places I will be going to are recommended as worth a visit, such as in Fiji, but I will instead limit my visit just to the main island of Fiji.

So from what I’ve seen and studied, the places to go in Polynesia are Rapa Nui, Hawai‘i, New Zealand, the Samoas, and Tahiti with its islands, plus Fiji over in Melanesia. And this is where dumb luck comes into play.

Although I’m pretty good at planning travel, sometimes just dumb luck works wonders. You may have considered it clever how I “planned” to visit Mount Saint Helens just before I went to Kilauea and the other volcanoes in Hawai‘i. Clever planning had nothing to do with it. I was literally talking to a ranger in the Mt St Helens visitor center when the subject of Hawaiian volcanoes came up, and it was only then that I made the connection that I’d be seeing the Hawaiian volcanoes within a week or two of that conversation. I knew of course I’d be going there, but hadn’t put together that the two visits sequenced themselves so well.

In the same vein, it was dumb luck that when I was on my way to Antarctica in 2006 I happened to plan to go to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) from Santiago de Chile (2006/14), since it was Chilean territory and the connections were so good. Similarly, having started with revisiting Alaska, I was finishing up going back to the quadrants of the US, and from the northwest just went back to Hawai‘i as well (2008/22-25). This wasn’t planned as visiting a part of Polynesia any more than the visit to Rapa Nui was; I only planned the Polynesia trip long after the Hawai‘i trip was already booked. Still, these two visits to these basic cornerstone destinations within Polynesia made planning visiting the rest so very much easier.

Put another way, it was only the sailing date of the QV that ended up determining that, only 68 days after flying off from Hawai‘i (to Seattle) on November 21, I would fly (from Los Angeles) to Samoa on January 28. But maybe the Polynesian gods might have had something to do with it, too.

But let’s get back to the planning. I knew I was going to be in LA, having gotten off the QV, and was prepared to fly back to New York, when I felt that adding three island stops (Samoa, Fiji, Tahiti) would take the load off of things to do on the way to a future Australian visit. At that point my mind continued to associate New Zealand with Australia, as happens to many if not most people. Also, research hadn’t shown me yet the historic connection of New Zealand to Polynesia. So I tried to find connections to those three islands, then zip back to LA.

In this regard, the old story comes to mind, whose punch line is one of my favorite travel quotes. It’s about the driver who stops and asks the farmer directions to a certain town. The farmer starts to describe one route, but no, that won’t work. He tries a second, and third, to no better avail. Finally, the farmer says, sorry, but “you just can’t get there from here”.

It’s only meant as a punch line in a story, but every traveler knows it’s really true. Sometimes points A and B just do not connect, no matter how hard you try. As far as I can tell, there are no interisland flight connections to speak of. There had been something called the Coral Route, that connected some (not all) of these islands in an east-west direction for many years, but that was first reduced to a non-daily connection, and was then abandoned in 2007. I did find one short connection of 1h50, between Samoa and Fiji, but it was only twice a week, left me too little time in Samoa, crossed the Dateline one more time than I needed, and worse yet, flew one day at 1:50 and the other at 5:30, but these times are IN THE MORNING. I’ve never heard of flights taking off at that time of night before.

I’m glad I’m not flying overnight from LA to Fiji, since you arrive TWO days later, once because it’s overnight and the second because you cross the dateline. The flight to Samoa I’m taking is just a simple overnight flight, but I’m lucky. It only goes once a week, and it just happens to be the evening of the day the QV docks in LA.

I could find plenty of flights to and from Samoa, Fiji, and Tahiti from Los Angeles and other West Coast cities, and was at first afraid I’d have to take long, long round trips back to LA, but then I stopped looking at the situation so parochially. I found that not only were there frequent connections from Australia (Sydney) and New Zealand (Auckland), in actuality these islands were in their “back yard”, the distance to them from these islands being much less than from the islands back to LA. It was at this point that I chose New Zealand as my southern connection, it having a Polynesian background anyway, and then figured that it’s foolish to go that far just to change planes there, so I added time within NZ as well. Thus, after the QV, I’ll not only be going to the three intermediate island areas, but to New Zealand, too. The easiest way was to take Air New Zealand from LA to Samoa, then on to Auckland in order to do a roundtrip Auckland/Fiji; then travel within NZ; then take Air Tahiti Nui from Auckland to Tahiti and back to LA (and to NY). Simply put, it’s a split trip to NZ, a side trip to Fiji, a split trip to LA.

The distance between Auckland and Los Angeles, depending on which islands you stop at in between, is 6600-6800 mi / 10,700-11,000 km. Southbound, LA to Samoa will be 73% of the distance, and Samoa to Auckland only 27%. Northbound, Auckland to Tahiti is only 38% of the total distance, while Tahiti to LA is 62%.

International Dateline   If the concept of the International Dateline is still unclear to you, please do review 2005/7 “International Dateline”, so that I don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Up until now, I’ve only had limited experience with it, specifically in 2006 when I went “Around the World by Rail via Siberia”. It was easy then, since I just had to skip one day moving across the Line from Vancouver in Today-Land to Seoul (then afterwards Vladivostok) in Tomorrow-Land. The day I lost was made up by gaining one hour at a time 24 times as I went around the world.

[When I explained this thought on the ship to an Aussie I met, I realized how parochial I was being in my attitude, calling them Today-Land and Tomorrow-Land, looking at it from the North American point of view. He prefers to think of me going from Yesterday-Land to Today-Land. Point well taken, and how beautifully that describes the alternate points of view. However, I’ll still maintain my terminology, since I am leaving from LA. It is always enlightening to talk to people.

As an adjunct to this, the last full day at sea before we arrived in LA was Australia Day, and it was announced as such, with a special barbecue in the late afternoon in the Winter Garden (I popped in, and it looked like fun). At lunch I was talking with an Australian couple, and wished them a happy Australia Day, to when the gentleman replied, with a wave of the hand “It was yesterday”. Now consider that. Some ¾ of a day earlier Australia Day had been celebrated in Australia, and now that same day had gone around the world and had reached us on the Pacific coast of North America where we were celebrating it. Does that make it the wrong day for us? As a matter of fact, the tail end of it was still going on in Australia. Yet, it’s an interesting point of view.]

I’ve already said above that an overnight flight from LA to Fiji arrives two days later, once because it’s overnight, and once because you cross the dateline from Today-Land to Tomorrow-Land. If I then went to Samoa, I’d come back to Today-Land, and then New Zealand would again be in Tomorrow-Land. This is too weird, which is why I’m glad I’ve been able to work it out that I go uniformly from LA to Samoa (both in Today-Land, although it’s an overnight flight), then connect in NZ for Fiji, later coming back to NZ (all in Tomorrow-Land). As I’ve set it up, I cross the Dateline only once westbound, but this means the flight from Samoa leaves at 2:25 PM on a Sunday, and arrives in Auckland four hours later, at 6:25 PM, but on Monday.

When I flew to Seoul, I stayed in Tomorrow-Land and kept on going around the world, so I just crossed out a day on my calendar. But I’ll be in Tomorrow-Land now just for 19 nights in NZ and Fiji, and I don’t want it to be so disruptive, having to skip a day then add it back in. My solution is to have dual markings on my calendar. I cross the line the first day of February (at least from my point of view), and the day I arrive my calendar now says Su 1 (“Mo 2”), so I remain aware of both possibilities. You have to be very careful to book hotels for the right nights, and also flights. For instance, my last night in Samoa will be a Saturday, then on arrival in NZ for my connection to Fiji I had to book my hotel for Monday night. Fun, right?

When I fly from Auckland in Tomorrow-Land back to Tahiti in Today-Land, this is how it works. The five-hour flight (plus one-hour-later time zone) takes off at 3:00 PM on what is locally a Friday afternoon and gets to Tahiti at 9:00 PM—but on Thursday night. My calendar for that day reads Th 19 (“F 20”), which means I’ll be finally slipping back into my home system. You can see that, although you can hop across the Dateline back and forth if you wish, it just makes for more record-keeping and calculations. You also need extra caution so that you don’t book hotels and flights for the wrong dates, so it’s best to minimize crossings if at all possible.

Time Zones   The Dateline, which zigzags roughly along the 180° parallel between islands to keep them uniformly on one side or the other, is merely a phenomenon of the usual familiar time zones. It’s just where the last hour of the old day disappears and the first hour of the new day emerges. But since we’re dealing with areas in the South Pacific so far from areas in the North Atlantic that the time variances become impressive.

Do another quick review, this time of UTC in 2008/9 “UTC”, where we discussed time zones in Africa. Considering UTC itself in London (Greenwich) being at 0, we had simple numbers east of that of UTC +1, +2, +3. Going east is always going later, since you’re getting closer to where the day had started at the Dateline, where the hours “come rushing toward you”. We also said that west of UTC you get negative numbers, US Eastern Standard Time being UTC -5, in the continental US reaching US Pacific Standard Time at UTC -8, since the new day hadn’t “rushed” quite that far yet, and we’re still waiting.

The furthest one to the east is UTC +12, and the furthest one to the west is UTC -11, since you have to include UTC itself (the equivalent of UTC +0), for a total of 24 hours.

Yet the explanation becomes much easier if we drop AM/PM and use the 24-hour clock, which I much prefer, and which is what I use on my laptop and which is always used internationally on schedules of every sort, other than ones directed to the US market, which unfortunately tends to drag itself behind the times in matters such as these. 06:00 is 6AM, 12:00 is noon, 15:00 is 3PM, 18:00 is 6PM, 21:00 is 9PM. (Military usage in the US writes these figures without the colon, but we’re not using military usage, but rather international usage.) Midnight has two designations. If you don’t know what they are, can you guess?

Midnight is designated either as 0:00 or 24:00, depending on whether you’re emphasizing the beginning of the day or the end. A train might leave at 0:10, but a sign might say a restaurant is open until 24:00. (0:00 can also be written 00:00).

It’s easiest to look at world times when it’s noon in London (Greenwich), since then it’s midnight at the Dateline. We’ll use Fiji in the first time zone (UTC +12) on the Tomorrow side of the Dateline, and Samoa in the last time zone (UTC -11) on the Today side.

A minute before noon in London (11:59) it’s a minute before midnight at the Dateline, meaning 23:59 (11:59 PM) in Fiji to its west and 24:59 (12:59 AM) in Samoa to its east. Notice that Samoa is finishing experiencing the last 59 minutes of the dying day, in its 24th hour.

After that minute goes by, it’s 12:00 (noon) on the dot in London and it’s 24:00 (midnight) in Fiji, indicating the new day about to be born. This moment is the only time the entire earth is in Today-Land all at once.

A minute later, when it’s 12:01 in London, a brand-new Tomorrow-Land emerges to the west out of the Dateline, and in Fiji, it’s 0:01.

In Samoa, which is just one hour (plus a day) later than Fiji at that point it becomes 01:01 (1:01 AM). And there we have it.

CROSSING THE DIAL FOR SIX HOURS It’s not hard to figure times in adjacent zones that are only a few numbers away, but is more awkward at great distances. I find the easiest change is just six hours, when you simply read across the clock dial. I’ll use US Eastern Standard Time to illustrate. This can be varied for other zones, CST being an easy one, and also for Daylight Time.

New York is at -5. Paris & Berlin are at +1, for a total of six hours’ difference, so we can just cross over the dial. Always remembering that eastbound is LATER, since it’s where the day is coming from, if it’s 9AM (09:00) in New York, just cross over the dial of the clock and it’s 3PM (15:00) in Paris/Berlin. If it’s 4PM in New York, cross over the dial, and it’s 10PM in Paris. Try it the other way, remembering that westbound times will be EARLIER. If it’s 7PM in Paris, cross the dial and it’s 1PM in New York. When working with London, which is closer to New York, always calculate Paris first, then go one hour earlier. This way, in the first two above examples, London would be at 2PM (14:00) and 9PM (21:00), respectively. The other way around, it would be 6PM in London to make it 7PM in Paris and 1PM in New York.

Now build on that. LA’s Pacific Standard Time is three hours earlier than New York, since the new day has further to go, and is at UTC -8. Hawai‘i and Tahiti are two earlier still at UTC -10, and Samoa is just one more, at UTC -11.

Now compare New York at UTC -5 and Samoa at UTC -11, and it’s just six hours earlier, so crossing the dial should work well again. When I was e-mailing hotels and tours in Samoa, if it was 3PM (15:00) in New York I crossed the dial and knew it was 9AM (09:00) in Samoa. 11PM was 5PM. Again, when doing Tahiti / Hawai‘i, it’s one hour closer to New York, so when I e-mailed Tahiti I figured Samoa first. The two situations above would yield 10AM and 6PM for Tahiti.

This is as close to the edge of Today-Land as we’re going to get. Remember to make an adjustment when EST goes to EDT. To figure out Tomorrow-Land logically (the long way around) is just a bit harder, but then we’ll do it the easy way.

FLIPPING THE DIAL FOR TWELVE HOURS When I hear that someplace is in Tomorrow-Land some umpteen hours ahead of where I am, my mind goes numb. Picturing that a place is in Tomorrow-Land is complex enough, but to get the time right seems impossible.

Fiji is UTC +12. Combine that with New York’s UTC -5 and you get a total of a 17-hour difference. But that’s the long way, eastbound via London. So working the long way round, if it’s 6AM today in New York, cross the dial to Paris for 12PM, then a London adjustment back to 11AM. At this point, we can flip the dial, by which I mean go from AM to PM (or vice-versa). 11AM today in London would be 11PM today in Fiji. End result: 6AM in New York is 11PM the same day in Fiji. That example works out within the same day, so let’s try one like this. 11AM today in New York, crossing the dial, is 5PM today in Paris and 4PM today in London. Flip that, and it’s 4AM in Fiji, but tomorrow.

Although this is the logical way to look at the way the numbering of the time zones works, it’s a cumbersome way to figure it. Also, 17 hours later the same day, or into tomorrow, just boggles the mind, and seems to have very little practical application.

A SHORT-CUT TO TOMORROW-LAND With a 17-hour difference, most times you calculate will fall into tomorrow, anyway, so why not just go right there the short way? Let’s abandon the previous method, even though it has the advantage of illustrating how the time-zone numbers work, and go directly.

If it’s 17 hours the logical, but long way eastward around the earth, then it’s only (24 – 17 =) 7 hours the short way, going westward. That does involve going from Today-Land to Tomorrow-Land directly, but you almost assuredly would have to change days, anyway, and using smaller numbers is always easier.

Those 7 hours (plus a day) from New York mean it’s only one hour more (plus a day) from Samoa. So let’s figure via Samoa, remembering again that westward means earlier.

3PM Tuesday in New York, crossing the dial, is 9AM Tuesday in Samoa. One more hour earlier is 8AM in Fiji, but WEDNESDAY, since we’ve crossed into Tomorrow-Land. This is much easier. Let’s try it again.

11PM Thursday in New York is 5PM Thursday in Samoa and 4PM Friday in Fiji.

This system is quite easy for a trip to Polynesia, even over the Dateline, since it involves Samoa’s time zone. And since Tahiti and Hawai‘i are both UTC -10, or one hour closer than Samoa, you could even figure that, in those last two examples, it would be 10AM (Tuesday) and 6PM (Thursday) in Tahiti.

So the whole system involves crossing the dial on a clockface, then moving one closer or further. If New York is 8PM, Samoa is earlier across the dial at 2PM, Tahiti is closer (later) at 3PM, Fiji is further (earlier) at 1PM, but tomorrow.

THE LURKING DAYLIGHT MONSTER In the northern summer, when New York has Daylight Savings Time and is on EDT, you have to adjust that to EST for this to work, but that won’t affect me now on this trip.

Fiji has no DST. Samoa hasn’t had any, but I read that it’s going on DST this coming October. But that won’t affect me.

We now come to New Zealand, where I will be in February, during the southern summer, and they have DST, so this becomes interesting.

NZ is normally at UTC +12, and therefore has the same time as its Tomorrow-Land neighbor, Fiji. If I were going to NZ in six months, I wouldn’t have to comment.

But NZ in February is on DST. Now think about that. When any area goes on DST it moves one time zone east, to where it’s one hour earlier. When New York and the US east coast go on DST, it’s the equivalent of moving from Eastern Time to Atlantic time, as in Halifax or Santo Domingo.

But NZ, like Fiji, sits just west of the Dateline. So what happens when it goes one hour earlier for DST from September to April? Its official designation moves to UTC +13, which is a strangely high sounding number. That means for the time it’s on DST, it no longer has the same time as Fiji, but instead the same time as Samoa, right? But since the Dateline doesn’t move, it has the same time as Samoa, but a day later, like Fiji, since it’s in Tomorrow-Land. Whee!