That is, of course, totally nuts and wouldn’t fly in any more familiar setting. (Maybe if you’re really lucky, Western powers have been involved in a land war and there’s a war museum that merits mention among an itinerary that’s otherwise 98% dynastic pottery and disused temples.) Hip young artists reimagining traditional art forms and themes through graffiti? Nope, ancient Buddhist reliquary is the only thing that defines modern Asia. Where a guidebook or tour leader might naturally explore both the modern and the traditional in a city like Amsterdam or Copenhagen or London, proudly drawing the connections between the new and the old, there’s a tendency in Asian travel to pretend like it’s not 2020, like the Silk Road has been newly-established, and like nothing that’s happened in the last 1000 years is worthy of any consideration. This is particularly true in Asia, where centuries of Orientalist mystique have left Western travel writers speaking of even minor cultural differences as if they make East and Southeast Asians another species of humanity entirely.

I mean to say, if you were browsing through your ticket folder and you saw a notice that said, “Passengers are advised that on some crossings twenty-four-hour loss of existence may occur” (which is, of course, how they would phrase it, as if it happened from time to time), you would probably get up and make inquiries, grab a sleeve, and say, “Excuse me.” There is, it must be said, a certain metaphysical comfort in knowing that you can cease to have material form and it doesn’t hurt at all, and, to be fair, they do give you back the day on the return journey when you cross the date line in the opposite direction and thereby manage somehow to arrive in Los Angeles before you left Sydney, which in its way, of course, is an even neater trick.A mistake travel guides - and, subsequently, travelers - frequently make is to act like cultures never change or advance. I find it a little uncanny, to say the least. All I know is that for one twenty-four-hour period in the history of the earth, it appears I had no being. Where it went exactly I couldn’t tell you. I left Los Angeles on January 3 and arrived in Sydney fourteen hours later on January 5.

“Each time you fly from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from you when you cross the international date line. Read what Bill Bryson says.The experience of travelling across the International Date Line in “In a Sunburned Country”.

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Crossing date line patch