Kiribati Skipped a Day to Move Time Zones

Kiribati straddles the equator in the central Pacific, 33 atolls spread across 3.5 million square kilometers of ocean. Until 1995, the International Date Line ran right through it. The government sat in Tarawa on the western side, one day ahead of the easternmost Line Islands. A civil servant in Kiritimati who needed to call the capital had only four business hours a week when both offices were open on the same calendar date.

President Teburoro Tito pushed to fix the arithmetic. On December 31, 1994, the government announced that the Line Islands would skip January 1 and jump straight to January 2. The eastern half of the country lost a day; the whole archipelago now lives on the same weekday.

The move also pushed Kiribati's Line Islands to UTC+14, making them the first populated place to enter any new day. That was not an accident. Tito's government wanted the tourism angle: Millennium Island (formerly Caroline Island) rebranded and was the first inhabited land to see the year 2000.

The International Hydrographic Organization and the US map-making bodies updated charts, the CIA World Factbook changed its tables, and commercial carriers adjusted routes. UTC+14 still exists only because Kiribati asked for it.

The one annoyance for travelers is philosophical more than practical. Cross between Samoa (UTC-11) and Kiritimati (UTC+14), about 2,200 kilometers apart, and you move a full 25 hours on the clock. The same sunlit island is Monday afternoon on one visit and Sunday afternoon on the next, depending on the direction you arrived from.