International Dateline   Leaving Samoa I crossed the International Dateline, Fiji and New Zealand being the two destinations on this trip on the other side of the line. Now having done this “line-hopping”, it’s become much clearer to me just how it works, and why. In addition, it’s no big deal. You’re simply at where the new day is starting, even though the old day is still moving around the rest of the world. My system of keeping dual dates on my calendar worked well. I adopted the local day and date, but just had to be careful when taking pills out of my daily pillbox to take Tuesday pills, even though locally it was already Wednesday.

I’ve talked a couple of times about how it works, but I’ve also heard recently from a traveler friend who wanted to review it some more so it would sink in. Actually, I wanted to further clarify it to myself as well, so I want to look at it from another point of view. This should further clarify it all, and, in addition, we can do some additional talk about time zones.

The confusion comes from doing too many things at once. Trying to understand the system of hours, but also the system of dates and days at the same time, is what causes the trouble. So let’s first remove the overlay of dates and days, and disregard them. Let’s just look at the hours, and nothing else.

But to do that best, we have to go backward and remove the overlay of time zones as well. Only by taking the system totally apart, and then putting it back together again, will it become totally clear. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but watching how the wheel was invented in the first place. So: no dates and days, and no time zones. Just time, as simplistically defined here as the movement of sunlight across the Earth’s surface.

Go back to what your elementary school teacher showed you when she shone a flashlight on an orange to show how the sun illuminates the earth. The center of that illumination on the orange is midday. By definition, the center of the dark back side of the orange is midnight. The orange (Earth) turns left-to-right, or eastward, so new areas keep on coming to the center of the illuminated area (noon). By definition, where an area in the dark on the left (West) moves into the light, it’s sunrise, and where an area on the right (East) moves from light to darkness, it’s sunset.

Picture public clocks, on City Halls, church steeples, street clocks. Think back a couple of centuries. Why were those clocks there? To give local people without watches the time, and to let people with watches know what time to set them to. But what time was shown on those public clocks? Local time, of course. Why would they show the time of some other place, even if it were nearby? Each city and town would check when the sun was overhead (more precisely, when the meridian of the sun was overhead, since the sun is directly overhead only on the equator, which is why the tropics are hot), and set the local clocks accordingly. This meant that noon would reach Boston, then, a while later, it would reach New York, while in Boston it was, maybe already 12:05 (these figures are not precise, but are just for illustration). When noon reached Philadelphia, New York might be 12:05, and Boston already 12:10. But who cared? Given the time it took your stagecoach or canal boat or coastal sailing ship to move from one to the other, who would care about a few minutes? (Should we call those few minutes “stagecoach-lag”?) Of course, cities on the same meridian would have the same time. Albany, due north of New York on the Hudson, would logically also have New York’s time.

Did you ever visit a location where they would shoot off a cannon at noon? Today, it’s done for the tourists, and is meaningless, but why did they do it originally? To set local time, of course. The cannon said it’s noon HERE, and don’t pay any attention to what time it is over THERE, down the coast.

And then there were time balls. Instead of firing a cannon at noon, in many cities a ball would descend a pole every day at a location everyone could see, and when it would reach the bottom, it signified it was noon. Noon HERE, and not THERE. There was one in New York for many years at the Battery, at the southern tip of Manhattan, where all the ships in the harbor, particularly new arrivals, could see it.

Does this time ball sound familiar? Of course it does, except that the concept was moved from the Battery to Times Square, it was further shifted from noon to midnight (making little sense, since midnight is a negative concept), and it’s now limited from daily use to use just once a year, on New Year’s Eve. It’s a great symbol of New York, but the whole point of doing it has been twisted beyond recognition of the original purpose.

So as we slowly reinvent this wheel, moving from then to now, what caused the change away from every community having its own local time? What’s your guess? I will hint that it’s particularly appropriate to discuss here, since it involves travel, but beyond the stagecoach and canal boat.

It was the railroads. Maybe the schedule of a slow-moving stagecoach didn’t matter if there were a few minutes’ difference in the times of various communities along their route, but railroads went fast. How could you set up a railroad timetable if it took only a matter of hours to travel between Boston and New York and Philadelphia and each city had its own time reference? Everyone would keep missing the train, for sure.

So the natural phenomenon of sunlight moving across the landscape had to be regularized because of the railroads, which involves a fiction, called Standard Time, which purports that it’s noon all across the landscape at the same time. But how was it done? Well, we calculate a day at having 24 hours. We still do, even though it was considered at one time to metricize hours, dividing the day into a nice set of ten metric super-hours, each 2.4 present hours long. But I digress. We continue to maintain a system of 24 hours, so a system was devised to divide the Earth into 24 zones, where the same, uniform time would be maintained in each. If you divide the Earth’s 360° by 24 hours, you’ll find that each time zone would be theoretically 15° across. Of course, we today twist and turn the borders of the zones around countries and states, but the concept is still there. Theoretically, it’s noon on a meridian down the center of the zone, and every community in the zone adjusts its time to the fiction that the sun is directly above all of them when it’s really only over the center of the zone.

So what does doing that involve? Communities near the center of the zone need to raise or lower their local times by just a few minutes, but communities out at the edges need to do a lot more. Using the US Eastern Standard Time zone as a reference, Maine, which is on the zone border at the East, had to subtract a full 30 minutes from its real time, while Indiana, on the zone border in the West, had to add 30 minutes. In this way, we live with the fiction that the sun is directly above the entire region between Maine and Indiana at the same time, a natural impossibility. You can also see that by each extremity of a zone adding or subtracting 30 minutes, it allows for the fact that there is one hour’s difference between zones. In other words, Chicago has subtracted 30 minutes to be consistent with Central Standard Time, while Indiana has added 30 minutes.

So instead of the orange rotating regularly under the light, every 60 minutes it jumps 1/24 of a turn. Well, we can’t visualize it that way, so, since it’s all a fiction anyway, let’s look at it the other way around. Let’s say that the orange does continue to rotate regularly to the East, but that all 24 hours slide westward to the next time zone every 60 minutes. It’s like a number of seated people waiting on a bench. Every time the person at the left end of the line goes into the doctor’s office, everyone on the bench moves up one position. Similarly, the hours move around the globe every 60 minutes. Slide. Slide. Slide.

If you can visualize these hours sliding to the left around the globe, then you understand how the 24 hours keep circulating, over and over. Just think “hours” and nothing else. This is the end of step one.

For step two, let me ask this. Where does a circle begin? Or to be more accurate, let’s move from two to three dimensions. Where does a sphere (like the Earth) begin? No answer? Of course not. They don’t have starting points. So I’m going to be arbitrary, and choose my own starting point on the Earth for counting the repeats of these hours. Let’s try Cape Town. All our calculations will start in Cape Town. Let me also pick one of the 24 hours at random, say 3 PM. So here we are, watching the hours sliding by Cape Town every 60 minutes. 3 PM goes by once, then 4 PM, then 5 PM. After 24 slides, 3 PM comes by again, then again, then again. As the hours continue sliding by, might it not be convenient to be able to refer to just which 3 PM is which? So let’s say the first one will be 3 PM¹, then 3 PM², and so on. Now we can keep track of them.

So 3 PM¹ slides into and then out of Cape Town, then 4 PM¹. After a lot more slides, finally the last one, 2 PM¹, comes by, and we’ve finished a cycle, so next comes 3 PM², 4 PM² and the rest of the next set. Now we can keep track of the endless sliding cycle of hours.

What have we just done? We’ve created dates. That 1 on 3 PM¹ can be January 1 and 2 can be January 2. You want days, too? So January 1 can be a Tuesday and January 2 Wednesday. But basically, we’re just trying to keep track of the endless cycle of hours sliding by. But as we have these dates and days, where we decide to start is ABSOLUTELY ARBITRARY, since there’s no real starting point on a sphere. And when a new cycle of hours sliding by starts, we’ll have a new day (and date) in Cape Town, but every other location will still be finishing up the old one.

But why keep track of 3 PM constantly going past? Let’s keep track of noon instead! That certainly seems to make sense. But wait. If we count each new cycle as beginning at noon, then the morning will be Tuesday, and the afternoon Wednesday. That’s awkward. How about keeping track of midnight! As 12 AM (much better expressed as 0:00) goes by, we’ll call that the new cycle, or the new day. So now we’re counting instead each 0:00 that goes by.

Using Cape Town arbitrarily is also awkward, since it will get the new day, but the adjoining region will still have the old day. So let’s put this arbitrary point where we’re going to start counting each new midnight in an area of low population. How about the mid-Pacific?

And so the International Dateline involves counting dates (and days), but superimposed on the system of hours sliding by from one time zone to the next. We count each midnight (0:00) as it goes by and say that Fiji is the arbitrary starting point for this new counting cycle, while Samoa is the last zone of the old one. People in the time zone that Fiji’s in will consider themselves “ahead”, but only because that’s where we arbitrarily start counting the hours as being new, as the endless cycle of hours goes by. People in this zone will then “send” the new hours around to everyone else, and when a given midnight arrives in Samoa will be the only time that the same day and date will encompass the Earth all at once.

Getting to Fiji   While my goal after Samoa was Fiji, the minimal air connections between them were horrible, all in the middle of the night, so I had set up Samoa as a stop on Air New Zealand between Los Angeles and Auckland, and then did Fiji as an ANZ round trip (“return trip”) out of Auckland. There were also financial benefits doing it this way.

Both New Zealand and Fiji are uniformly one time zone west of Samoa. If New Zealand had been on Standard Time (it wasn’t), it would have worked this way. I flew out of Samoa at 14:20 (2:20 PM), which means it was 13:20 in Fiji, and would also have been in NZ. However, Samoa’s 14:20 was the last (24th) appearance of the 14:00 hour around the Earth, since it had already appeared everywhere else, and this appearance was classified as Sunday. while Fiji’s 13:00 hour was the first appearance of that hour on the globe under the Monday designation (twelve other hours had already preceded it). It would then go around the globe and Monday would finally appear in Samoa many hours later. That’s how it goes being on the borderline, both at the beginning and the end. Under these circumstances, my flight leaving Samoa, via New Zealand, then back to Fiji would have involved (1) the one-hour earlier time shift, like going from New York to Chicago, plus (2) positioning myself at the beginning of the new cycle, in other words going from Sunday, which was ending, to Monday, which was beginning.

The only minor modification was that New Zealand was indeed on Daylight Time (don’t get confused by this). That means it had changed the HOUR only, and was artificially on Samoa time. It was still as much Sunday there as it was in Fiji. So my actual flight didn’t change time zones because of NZ’s DST, but did change days. Then, when I flew to Fiji the next morning, THAT’s when I had the hour’s change, since Fiji was not on DST. If this latter problem is confusing, forget it, because the actual Standard Time situation as explained in the previous paragraph is the one to keep in mind.

So I flew out of Samoa at 14:20 on a Sunday and arrived in Auckland just four hours later, at 18:20--but on Monday, since this was the new cycle of counting the hours, and, laying fiction upon fiction, NZ’s Daylight Time aligned it with Samoa and away from Fiji. So be it.

I was totally blown away by the beautiful Auckland airport. It’s only a couple of years old, and highly efficient (this coming from me, who isn’t one to be wont to praise airline facilities). Arriving passengers were zipped through, there were information areas for easy help, and the next morning, leaving for Fiji, I found that each departure gate was one level below the departure concourse, very nicely separating traffic from those waiting to leave.

I had booked a room at a nearby airport hotel, whose van picked me up and returned me the following morning to the airport. Although I’d be returning to NZ in a few days for a complete visit, this overnight change of planes allows me to count New Zealand as TCC destination # 119.

Fiji Background   Fiji, then, becomes destination # 120. (I just love writing “Fiji” in lower case, because those three dots in a row just fascinate me, while “FIJI” in capitals doesn’t cut it.) I left tropical Samoa’s heat for beautiful, pleasant weather in NZ, only to return to tropical Fiji’s heat. Bula!

All island groups actually consist of many islands, mostly tiny. Fiji has several hundred, but essentially there are two major ones, large Viti Levu, plus another major island just north of Viti Levu, but half its size. Fiji is my only stop technically outside Polynesia, as it’s part of Melanesia, yet you will still note language similarities to both Hawaiian and Samoan. Just note once again the simple syllabic structure of Cv (one consonant plus one vowel) in the name Viti Levu.

Viti means “Fiji”, and we can all speculate how Westerners got “Fiji” out of the word “Viti”. At least the vowels are the same in both forms. Viti Levu means “Big Fiji”, so it’s clearly the main island. I understand out-islanders call Viti Levu “the mainland”, which does seem quaint. Bula! Bula!

None other than Abel Tasman first sighted Fiji in 1643, and over a century later, Captain James Cook in 1755 actually visited one of its southernmost islands. But the strongest affect on Fiji was had by a surprising figure. After the mutiny on HMS Bounty in 1789, none other than Captain William Bligh sailed through the islands and plotted them. To this day, the channel between the two major islands is called Bligh Water, and a leading rum is called Bounty Rum. You expect people’s names to be adopted (Cook Islands, the town of Captain Cook on the Kona coast, Tasman Sea, Tasmania), but it’s surprising how often ship names appear as well.

Viti Levu is an oval, and looks on the map like an egg lying on its side. Fiji’s capital is Suva, and is on the south coast, at the far eastern end. It has an airport, but the main Fiji airport is at Nadi (NAN.di – yes, that IS the pronunciation), Fiji’s third largest city, quite some distance away (190 km / 118 mi) in the center of the west coast. This caused me a minor dilemma. No Suva hotels attracted me, and anyway, while I wanted to see Suva, I didn’t want to be located so far away from transportation. On the other hand, quite close to Nadi and its airport is a large resort development called Denarau Island (but is attached to the mainland). It was started thirty years ago on filled-in swampland, and has upscale housing, a golf course, a marina, and Westin, Sheraton, Sofitel, Hilton, and other hotels. On top of that, both the Westin and Sheraton are Starwood hotels, and I could stay there free on points for the three nights I wanted, so Denarau it was to be, wary as I was of staying in a resort area. The Westin and Sheraton are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but Frommer had said that while they both had huge open lobbies, the Westin’s was in traditional Fijian style as a wood-beamed bule (like a Samoan fale), so the Westin Denarau it was.

I had read in advance about the unusual ethnic situation in Fiji. Indigenous Fijians form only 51% of the population. Surprisingly, Indo-Fijians form a huge 44%, and the remaining 5% consists of other Pacific Islanders, Chinese, and Europeans. I was curious how such a large population from India settled in Fiji, and I found out more once I was there.

The British ruled Fiji from 1854 until when Fiji became an independent republic in 1970. It was in 1879 when the British brought workers from India to work in the sugar cane fields as indentured laborers. Perhaps the British felt that the work ethic of the local Fijians wasn’t up to the standards they wanted, while that of the Indians was. They came on five-year contracts to work, but then, finding life in Fiji better than at home, about 60% of them stayed. Once the Indian presence was established, others followed from India who didn’t have anything to do with the original work program.

As unified as Fijians would like to be, there are ethnic disagreements. The Indo-Fijians are shopkeepers. It is hard to see a business in Fiji that isn’t Indian-owned and operated. The native Fijians tend more to be the workers, so already we see the basis for employer-employee conflict. Native Fijians see the stereotype of Indo-Fijians as being greedy and inconsiderate. Indo-Fijians see the stereotype of native Fijians as being poor, backward, naïve, and foolish. It is easy to see that the two communities would treat each other standoffishly.

There are three official languages in Fiji. Native Fijians speak Fijian among themselves. Indo-Fijians speak Hindi among themselves, or actually a slightly evolved version referred to as Fiji Hindi. And everyone speaks English with each other, and with outsiders. Of course this is all very stereotypical, and I have evidence that some Fijians speak Hindi and some Indians speak Fijian. Communities cannot live cheek by jowl without some overlap. Bula!

Fijian   I have been making a concerted attempt to irritate everyone by saying Bula!, or a double Bula! Bula! over and over. Well, if I had to put up with it, why shouldn’t you get a taste of it?

I’m being facetious. Bula (MBU.la) is the friendly greeting you hear everywhere in Fiji. It means literally “health” and is used constantly, sometimes in double form. After a while, one, too, starts to give a Bula! to everyone one passes, just to avoid being impolite. But it’s everywhere.

What in Samoa is a lava-lava is in Fiji a sulu, and they’re worn quite a bit as well. The typical community-house building is a bure (MBU.re). Its roof is different in that it’s squared off, and very steep. In other words, both long sides are very steeply peaked, as are both short sides.

You have to have noticed (because I sneakily slipped them in) some oddities of Fijian, and its spelling system, developed by missionaries. These are worth looking into.

In any language, both M and B are formed on the lips; N and D on the tongue-tip; NG and G on the back of the tongue. Since they’re in the same location, it’s easy for them to pair up: tiMBer, tiNDer, liNGGer (actually just spelled “linger”, hiding the G). There is also the humorous pronunciation of “boy!” as “mmmboy!”.

In Fijian, though, it seems that these combinations are considered to be single sounds. In other words, MB, while two sounds (phonemes) in most languages, seem to just one sound (phoneme) in Fijian. Or look at it this way. You cannot just say B. It always appears as MB, no matter how it’s spelled. So Bula!

I’m going to point out five items. First, Fijian apparently has a TH sound as in “that”. The Missionaries wanted to use a single letter to spell it, and apparently, they hadn’t yet used C, so that’s what they used. Place names with C aren’t too frequent on my map, but here are two: Cuvu; Macuata, which would be THU.vu and ma.thu.A.ta.

The second item is old hat, if you remember anything about Samoan. G represents NG in both languages. So Pago Pago is Pang-o Pang-o, you’ll remember (not *Pang-go!). A larger Fijian city I stopped in was Sigatoka. How would you say that? How about Naviyago? Vitago? Lawaga? They’d be pronounced as though they were spelled Singatoka, Naviyango, Vitango, Lawanga, but don’t add a G!

But it’s the last trio that’s the best, which is again MB, ND, NGG. MB is always spelled just with the letter of its last sound, B, as in Bula. So try Vanubua, Bavu, Korobebe. They sound like Vanumbua, Mbavu, Korombembe.

ND is also spelled just with the letter of its last sound, D, so now you know why Nadi is pronounced Nandi! (But note that the call letters of Nadi International Airport are NAN.) So try Denarau, Nadelei, Delakado. They sound like Ndenarau, Nandelei, Ndelakando.

The last of that trio is NGG, which is the actual NG + G as we say in fingger (spelled finger without the G that’s pronounced). But we have a problem. MB is spelled B, and ND is D, in other words, just using the letter of the second sound. But you can’t do that with NG-G, since G is already taken to use as a simple NG (above). What the missionaries did was similar with choosing C, which had nothing to do with TH. They just looked for another letter they hadn’t used, and decided on, of all things Q! In other words, in Fijian, the spelling Q represents NG+G (while G represents a simple NG). So Naqara sounds like Nang-gara. Try these: Naqali, Lawaqa, Beqa, Caqelai. They sound like Nang-gali, Lawang-ga, Mbeng-ga, Thang-gelai. And finally, what about Naiqaqi? That would be Naing-gang-gi.

If Fijian spelling were used in English, “singer” and “finger” would be “siger” and “fiqer”, “the other brother” would be “ce ocer brocer”, and “a Sunday in December” would be “a Suday in Deceber”.

My Visit   After the one-night cool respite in Auckland after leaving hot Samoa, I arrived in hot Fiji. I learned on arrival about the serious flooding that Nadi had suffered the first week of January this year. They were still repairing the roads in the area, and, of all the shops in town that had been flooded, some were still boarded shut. You could also tell that most of the shops, open or closed, had Indian names. But it was only the town area along the river that was affected. Denarau Island was untouched. The hotels all looked alike: a huge open lobby, and the Westin lobby did have a wooden ceiling that did look like a bure, a pool area visible through the lobby, and a view of the ocean, with the requisite palm trees. The rooms were in a series of separate nearby buildings, and it was obvious that occupancy was low.

I had booked, long in advance, a Suva tour, and a Nadi area tour, which I confirmed on arrival. I knew in advance that the Suva tour would be a doozy, and so it was. It was scheduled for twelve hours, 7 AM to 7 PM: four hours driving, four hours visit, four hours driving. I knew what I was in for, but I wanted to see Suva. I dozed on the bus as we drove along the south shore, stopping to pick up more people at large resorts that were cookie-cutter in style to mine. One was next to Sigatoka, mentioned above. The tour leader said a double Bula! Bula! after almost every sentence.

Suva is a nice, colonial-looking town. We saw government buildings and a museum, where I learned a lot more about Indo-Fijians. After lunch, we walked around the center on our own. I enjoyed seeing the main square, called the Triangle, and the historic areas along the river, where the town was founded, now used for shopping. I also peeked into the Suva municipal market to see the fruits and vegetables, always fun. But it was so hot that I sat down in a store until it was time for the bus to leave for the four hours back.

The next day I had a half-day tour of the Nadi area. The tour guide was an ebullient native Fijian, and the driver a dour, quiet Indian. We again stopped at a market, and the guide’s insights as to what was being sold there were illuminating. For instance, I now know that tapioca is a root, and only as it’s grated do the bits assume their signature ball-bearing shape.

The highlight was the orchid garden, known as the Garden of the Sleeping Giant, named after the adjoining mountain. It had been established in 1977 by the late Raymond Burr, the actor who played Perry Mason and Ironside, who was a lover of Fiji. Hot as the walk was, the different shapes of flowers proved to be amazing.

We then stopped at a Fijian village, Viseisei (note the reduplication in the name). A woman took us around and showed us the church and the bure, still used regularly for official village matters. Here was an indication of the importance of village life and of the extended family, similar to Samoa. You can imagine how this lifestyle might conflict with the Indo-Fijian way of life. We then drove past an extremely colorful Hindu temple, which is the largest in the South Pacific.

All this running around in the heat took a great deal of energy, but I did have a day and a half to just be at the resort, but mostly indoors, writing and reading. I will end my resort experience with one negative and one positive.

The resort restaurants were both incredibly overpriced, and more upscale than one might have wanted if you just were looking for a bit of dinner. This was true about the one restaurant at the Westin, a steakhouse, and the restaurant at the Sheraton. The price they wanted at the Sheraton buffet restaurant was disgusting. Finally, on the last day, someone on a bus mentioned the restaurants at the marina, which I was totally unaware of. I took the free shuttle that goes between all the hotels and the marina, and found at least two restaurants I could have gone to, one Italian, and the other the Indigo (I just love that name), which served both Indian and other Asian food, and which I chose. Excellent.

The positive point was this. After eating at that Westin steakhouse earlier, I decided to walk along the resort’s wooden footpath along the beach to enjoy the night air. What I found there was so nice, I did it again the following night. Under a cluster of palm trees, just beyond the swimming pool and near the beach, was an oversized hammock. It was so large, it took some effort to get into. I rocked in it each time for quite a while, in the cool, but humid night air. The palm trees were floodlit from below, and their fronds were silhouetted against the night sky, with the moon peeking through right above. Just below, on the beach, you could hear the regular slapping of the waves on the shore. In spite of my concerns about the restaurant situation, this was a beautiful, relaxing way to end the evening.