Inside Out and Upside Down

There are few experiences I've ever had in my travels that are more disconcerting and disorienting than flying between Canada and Australia or New Zealand.

I went for the first time in 1994 and as you read this I am ready to leave and go again.

To grasp the scope of the problem, you really need to take another look at a map of the world: a kind of map such as you rarely see in North America although it's common in Australia and New Zealand.

The first key fact is that the Pacific Ocean is humongous -- the Atlantic shrinks almost to the dimensions of a puddle by comparison.  We aren't normally aware of its sheer size in North America because it always appears in two separate chunks out at the edges of our traditional styles of world maps.  But yes, it's huge.  A nonstop flight from the west coast of North America to Sydney in Australia will take 14 or 15 hours, give or take a bit.  

And that's only the beginning of the problem.  Depending on route and time of year, you're going to cross anywhere from five to eight time zones on the way down -- cue the massive jetlag.

And as if that weren't enough, you're going to cross two imaginary but nonetheless very significant lines on the map: the Equator and the fiendish International Date Line.

Take the Equator first.  As soon as you cross that line into the southern hemisphere, things began happening that can disorient you mightily.  I found out about the big Number One on my first day in New Zealand 22 years ago.  I was on a driving trip along the coast, and stopped for a swim and quick power nap at a beach.  Since I'd been driving south when I stopped, I turned south out of the parking lot when I got rolling again.  But something was wrong.  After a few minutes I could see that I was passing road signs and a village that I'd already driven through before my stop.  And that's when it hit me: in the southern hemisphere, the sun parades across the NORTH side of the sky.  Thinking "south", I automatically turned towards the sun -- when I should have turned away from the sun to keep travelling southwards.  

You can get a distinct feeling that everything is backwards in other ways too.  The sun still crosses the sky from east to west but, as you stand facing the sun, it is travelling from right to left, not from left to right.  This all took a few days to get used to.  Less confusing, but still a bit odd, is the reversal of the seasons, so that the dead of winter in Canada coincides with the height of summer in Australia and New Zealand.

And then there's the pesky, man-made Dateline.  When the system of universal time zones was developed in the late 1800s (by, among others, Canadian engineer Sir Sandford Fleming) it became necessary to set a point at which each day would officially "begin".  Since there was already extensive traffic of ships across the Atlantic Ocean, the decision was taken by an international conference to follow Fleming's suggestion and set the starting point in the middle of the Pacific, along or near the 180 degree meridian of longitude, where it would inconvenience the smallest number of people.

Well, that's no longer true because of the development of longer-range aircraft and the vast increase in trans-Pacific trade.  But we're stuck with it now.  

The workings of the International Dateline baffle many people, but the concept is actually quite simple.  Let's zoom in on the map and have a closer look.   All the zigzags are just to allow the entire territory of one country or another to be on the same side and therefore on the same day.  Each day, then, actually begins first in New Zealand and the Pacific island countries of Samoa, Fiji, Tuvalu and Kiribati.  The real champion among inhabited territories is the island of Kiritimati (that's pronounced "Christmas", by the way), the easternmost inhabited island of the nation of Kiribati.  It's in that big jog to the south of Honolulu.

As you cross the Dateline going west, you set your clocks ahead by one entire day.  Going east, you set your clocks back by one entire day.  People in Australia and New Zealand are much more used to this gimmick than we are, and will say, ever so casually, "We're eighteen hours ahead of you" or whatever the exact time difference may be. When you get right down to it, that's the easiest way to calculate the time difference between home and where you are in those countries.  I quickly caught the habit when I was there before.

The one time when the relationship becomes really clear is on New Year's Eve, when the television shows the fireworks going off in Auckland and Sydney long hours before the ball drops in Times Square in New York -- in fact, around sunrise New York time on December 31!

When the Dateline gets really weird, though, is when you fly across it.  Going west, many nonstop flights travel through the night.  So you will leave, let's say, Los Angeles on a Monday night.  During the flight your clock will advance to Tuesday at midnight and then as you cross the Dateline it will advance again and you'll arrive in Auckland or Sydney early on Wednesday morning.  Tuesday has simply vanished from your calendar.  This could be excessively bizarre if you happened to have your birthday on that Tuesday!

On the return flight, because of the direction the time zones are rolling, you can leave Auckland or Sydney on Thursday around 1:00 pm, fly through the rest of the day, evening, and night, and land in Los Angeles in the morning in time for a late breakfast -- but it will still be Thursday, so you will actually get almost all of Thursday twice.  Obviously the only sensible thing to do is to fly home on your birthday and be sure to have your cake in Australia and eat it too in North America!

As for me, the mere thought of a 14-hour nonstop flight is enough to exhaust me (once when I was 40 years old was quite enough).  If you look again at the map, you'll see that convenient cluster of islands about a third of the way across the ocean from the U.S. West Coast.  It's called "Hawaii", and that gives me my cue.

Even a two and a half hour stopover in Honolulu is a huge benefit on such a long trip, giving you a chance to stretch your legs, rehydrate, breathe fresh air (sections of the terminal at Honolulu are linked by outdoor walkways) and generally wind down before the next leg.  Not only that, but it becomes simplicity itself to throw in an extended stopover in Hawaii at next to no extra charge on your ticket, as I am doing on the way home.

Best of all, it gives me my excuse to fly again with one of my all-time favourite carriers: Hawaiian Airlines.  You have to try this airline to believe it.  The service is always outstanding, attentive and friendly, and the food is a far cry from traditional "airline food".  The menus offer an intriguing fusion of various Pacific cultures, just as Honolulu itself is a city populated by almost all the nationalities of the Pacific Rim.  If you want to see what I mean, go to their website and you can find menus for the meals served in business or first class and in economy class on all their major routes.  Indeed, Hawaiian Airlines (as far as I know) is the only airline that gives free meals to all passengers (not just the premium cabin) between the U.S. mainland and Hawaii.  A trip on Hawaiian always makes me wonder why anyone would want to fly across the South Pacific with any other airline.