Nadi, Fiji · UTC+12 ☆

Nadi is the entry point for most of the world’s visitors to Fiji. Its international airport handles the long-haul flights from Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Asia, and the town itself is built largely to serve the tourism economy. But Nadi’s position in time is genuinely remarkable: during daylight saving, it sits at UTC+13, among the furthest ahead of UTC of any inhabited place on earth.

Fiji introduced daylight saving time in 2009, adjusting clocks forward one hour from late October to mid-January. In standard time, Fiji sits at UTC+12. During daylight saving, the clocks move to UTC+13. This means that for several months of the year, Fiji is among the first places on earth to experience each calendar day, crossing midnight before Tonga (which sits permanently at UTC+13) in some configurations.

an airport city at the edge of tomorrow

Nadi sits on Fiji’s main island of Viti Levu, on the drier western coast. At 17 degrees south, the city doesn’t experience dramatic seasonal daylight swings, but it gets noticeably more light in the southern summer, when daylight saving applies. The airport runs around the clock regardless.

Nasinu to the east on the same island shares Nadi’s timezone. Flights from Nadi to Sydney cross into a timezone that is 2 or 3 hours earlier despite being geographically to the west, a consequence of the International Date Line running east of Fiji.

9am in Nadi is 9pm the previous day in London.

Sources

• IANA Time Zone Database - Pacific/Fiji
• Fiji Meteorological Service