Kiribati is the only country in the world located simultaneously in two pairs of Earth’s hemispheres: North, South, West and East. The territory of the state consists of many small islands. Even its capital, South Tarawa, covers several land areas at once. Kiribati is a Pacific state located in Micronesia and Polynesia.
Today, out of 33 islands, 13 are inhabited, their area is 812 square kilometers. At the same time, the total territory of the country, taking into account the coastal zone, is 3.5 million square kilometers. Kiribati includes the largest coral atoll in the world – Kiritimati Island (Christmas Island) with an area of 388 square kilometers. The main city in the state is South Tarawa. The capital is located on the western border of the country, on the atoll of Tarawa.
Find cheap flights to anywhere in the world on Aviata.kz. The atoll itself visually resembles a triangle of narrow strips of land with a lagoon inside. South Tarawa occupies only four islands at the base of this conditional triangle. 50,000 people live in the city and about 120,000 statewide. The Republic of Kiribati only came into existence in 1979, when the islands of the Gilbert Archipelago gained independence from Britain. The peculiarity of the country is that the New Year comes first on Christmas Island and a number of neighboring islands, and every new day.
The countdown here literally breaks the existing system. The time zones here range from extreme (UTC+12) to formally not allowed to be (UTC+14), as the Earth is conditionally divided into 24 zones counted from the zero meridian – up to +12 at the east and -12 to the east. West. In 1995, local authorities decided to move the International Date Line. Now, with a number of neighboring countries, the time difference is more than a day – up to 25 hours. Another interesting point is that Christmas Island has its own villages of Paris, London and Poland.
