And if that means being permanently half an hour behind the rest of New South Wales, so be it.ĭespite daft time zone switches taking place all over the world, Australia arguably hosts the titan of the genre. Eucla is the first town you hit on the Nullarbor after crossing the border from South Australia. Broken Hill may be in New South Wales, but historically its rail link has always been to South Australia, so it works to South Australian time. Trans-Siberian railway always sticks to Moscow time, no matter what.Īustralia's weird time zones don't start and end with Tweed Heads and Coolangatta, though. Start in Tweed Heads, then stroll over into Coolangatta, and the party starts again an hour later. That means the twin towns have managed to carve out a peculiar niche as somewhere that you can celebrate New Year's Eve twice. The two states are ostensibly in the same time zone, but New South Wales observes daylight saving, and Queensland doesn't. Well, seamlessly apart from the time that is. Tweed Heads at the very north of New South Wales merges seamlessly into Coolangatta on Queensland's Gold Coast. If that same city, different time zones thing seems rather familiar, it's because there's an Aussie counterpart. They're effectively the same city, and you can go forward an hour simply by crossing the road. And, there's the case of Moenkopi (inside the Hopi Reservation) and Tuba City (part of the Navajo Nation). It is also not contiguous, so driving through Arizona can be a bewildering case of repeatedly switching time zones. Making things even more confusing is the Hopi Reservation, which is entirely surrounded by the Navajo Nation, and doesn't observe daylight saving time. In practice, though, locals in Xinjiang tend to stick to an unofficial UTC+6 time zone – which can make finding out what time it actually is incredibly confusing. This creates a 3.5 hour jump when crossing into Afghanistan – where the time is UTC+4.5. This was decided in 1949 and Beijing time (UTC+8) was picked. And it borders China's westernmost Xinjiang Province.Ĭhina, in a bid to impose some sort of national unity on its frontier territory, has decided the whole country should stick to one time zone. But Afghanistan has a tiny sliver of land, dominated mostly by a nature refuge, that sticks out between Pakistan and Tajikistan. It's hardly the busiest border in the world, and most travellers are unlikely to go anywhere near it. But there are some pockets of the world where time zones don't quite behave as you think they might – whether it's jumping forward in strange increments or taking massive cross-border leaps… Turning the clock back a few hours after getting off a flight or switching to daylight savings is to be expected when travelling. Hotel clocks showing times around the world.
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