Where is the earliest time in the world

New Year, New York. New Year, Borneo. New Year, Macau. New Year, Ecuador. New Year, Melbourne. New Year, Chile. New Year, Vladivostok. Christmas in Vanuatu. Back to Travel Photos. Search for City:. Kiribati is also one of the few places in the world to straddle all four hemispheres, which means that, because its habitable land consists of just thirty-three delicate atolls ring-shaped coral reef islands — could it get more romantic?

To find Kiribati, first find a bold north-south line cutting through the Pacific Ocean. These rarest of time zones were established by Kiribati, on an entirely unilateral basis, on 31 December , for the purpose of removing certain absurdities from the daily lives of its citizens.

When Kiribati was granted sovereignty over the Line Islands in , shortly after itself gaining independence from the United Kingdom, it found they posed a chronological puzzle.

The trouble was their new additions were the other side of the International Date Line which meant that when it was, say, Saturday in Tarawa, which is the most heavily-populated of the Kiribati atolls, it would be Friday on Kiritimati also known as Christmas Island in the Line Islands to the east.

The International Date Line is one of the messier reminders that the time we set our watches by is not preordained but rather an ingenious human construct. In the case of Kiritamati and Tarawa, they were divided by a whole, unambiguous day. Government offices became exasperated by only being able speak to one another four days a week and so, figuring the date line to be largely fictitious anyway, they moved it. They are guided by the light — the Earth rotates, causing the sun to rise and set, and our local times of day reflect this — but the rigidity of their contours are an example of how society relies on the fabrication of some sort of consensual reality.

Usually this is straightforward enough that we can just accept it. Dhaka , Almaty , Bishkek , Thimphu. Kathmandu , Pokhara , Biratnagar , Dharan. New Delhi , Mumbai , Kolkata , Bengaluru. Pakistan and 8 more. Tashkent , Islamabad , Lahore , Karachi. Kabul , Kandahar , Mazari Sharif , Herat.

Azerbaijan and 8 more. Moscow , Ankara , Baghdad , Nairobi. Greece and 32 more. Cairo , Athens , Bucharest , Johannesburg. Sat Germany and 45 more. Brussels , Madrid , Paris , Rome , Algiers. United Kingdom and 24 more. London , Dublin , Lisbon , Accra , Reykjavik.

Cabo Verde and 2 more. Praia , Ponta Delgada , Ittoqqortoormiit. King Edward Point , Fernando de Noronha.