World of the Bizarre

Revellers 'time travel' to celebrate New Year twice... sort of

By T.K. Randall
January 4, 2026 ·  4 comments

Image: AI-generated (Midjourney) Time travel has been a staple of science fiction for years, but some people have managed to find a way to actually experience it for themselves - albeit in a rather different sense.

The secret lies in the fact that January 1st doesn't start for everyone everywhere in the world at the same time, instead progressively arriving across the globe due to time zone differences.

This means that while Sydney is celebrating the New Year, the United States is still several hours away from the turning of the calendar.

Technically, therefore, if someone happened to see the celebrations in Sydney and then travelled quickly enough in the opposite direction, they could experience New Year again a few hours later.Of course, it's not really time travel in a literal sense - they wouldn't be traveling into the past - but it would enable someone to experience the New Year celebrations twice if they really wanted to.

Examples of this actually happening can be found in the flight logs for January 1st when, for example, a flight taking off from Tokyo at 1am on January 1st arrived in Los Angeles at 6pm on the previous day.

There was also a flight from Guam that took off at 7:40am on New Year's Day before touching down in Hawaii at 6:55pm on New Year's Eve.

Sure, it's a lot of trouble to go to simply to take advantage of a calendar quirk, but for those with enough time, patience (and money), it would certainly make for a unique New Year experience.

Source: Lad Bible | Comments (4)

Tags: Time