The Time Traveller’s LifeBy Lee

The flight from Honolulu to Auckland, New Zealand is divided by a short layover in Fiji. Incongruously, the flight time between the two islands is in the region of 26 hours, which of course is accurate, if we were travelling by speed-boat.

The inflated flight time is, obviously, distorted by the fact that, somewhere at 30,000 feet and over 600kph, we cross over the International Date Line, deprived of the entire day we’ve previously stolen by constantly chasing the sun westwards.

Flight time is actually about six hours, but with the jolting effect of at one point being behind home in terms of time to now being somewhere in its near future, it’s perplexing and a tad off-putting. Everything becomes relative when the universe is viewed, not from a fixed point in time, but a constantly changing one.

Time itself is merely a human construct; a handy tool for us to chronicle our lives with. If regularly changing time-zones has made me realise one thing, it’s a heightened realisation that our world is unremittingly active, ever moving toward some unknown goal; a constant as we sleep half our lives away. With people back home and others waiting to meet us along the way, it becomes abundantly evident that this world we inhabit is an exceptionally small place, and one that is shrinking in size each day.

As a child I was fascinated by the International Date line; this imaginary border in time and space – a doorway to what my befuddled pre-adolescent mind equated to “simple time travel.” Just keep travelling west, step into tomorrow, keep going and do the same again.  Of course it – unfortunately – doesn’t work that way, and instead of speeding into a future populated by hover-boards and a rejuvenated space-travel program, instead we arrive in Fiji dazed, completely out of sync and somewhat taken aback at the duty-free prices smirking back at us in a pokey connection terminus.

We walk around the concourse in ever-tiring circles, unwilling to stall and hence become sucked into nefarious sales staffs’ spheres of influence. In less than an hour we’re ushered back out towards a new plane and I manage to convince Sheila to take a photo of some Fijian mountains that almost encroach into the airport’s environs. Our one photo of Fiji. It’s only after she takes it do I realise that we are, in fact, also taking a photo of the airport and, considering the number of coups Fiji has had of late, taking photographic evidence of anything to do with aviation might not be completely au faux with the current junto.

As I sit strapped into yet another jet, once again about to be fired westward (now chasing lost hours rather than furtively stealing them) I realise that my actual crossing of the date line was a total non-event; mostly because I had no real way of knowing when it actually happened. If I was the captain I would have at least mentioned it. After all, It’s not something most average people do every day of their lives. Flying over imaginary political lines of countries, sure – we do that all of the time. But jump days? I’m quite sure I’ll never do it again.

I smile as I realise I’ve joined the ranks of such people as Charlton Heston and Marty McFly – an eclectic club of time travellers of which time has no dominion. Well, not completely. It’s all well and good saying you jumped into the future by flying over an invisible spot in space but I’m hardly foolish enough to think it means a great deal. That said, I do absently wonder what other people make of the time-shift and how they acknowledge their own personal experience crossing the dateline – if at all. Might some furtively scurry off to the airplane toilets to join the Mile High Club? I suppose there is some audacity in claiming (speciously) that you once had sex for an entire day.

What did I do to mark this unique milestone? As the new Star Trek film starts and the plane makes its way south-westerly on to New Zealand, I realise with wry recall that I was playing Indiana Jones (of the Lego variety) on my PSP at the time. Dr. Jones: a fitting companion on my adventure.

Tags: Fiji, International Date Line, Time travel