After the other Polynesian islands we visited, Niue seems very flat. It is a raised atoll, and its highest point is only about 60 meters – no mountains there. We have been told that the name means "lots of coconuts" but it did not seem to have very many coconut palms compared to other islands we have been on.

Niue is a very small island (100 square miles), with only about 1100 inhabitants . Niue is the world's smallest self-governing state. It was rather amusing to consider that by anchoring in the harbor and going ashore, we are probably doubling the population on the island. When I mentioned this to one of the ship’s crew, he said, “Maybe we should invade it.”  Well, Niue provides free wifi to the entire island, and what we did nearly was an invasion. The tenders took passengers to the pier at Alofi, which is the largest town on the island, but it is very small by our standards. There is one supermarket on the island, and most of the stores are either on the square or the other side of the street from it. That square and nearly every flat place in town was occupied by ship passengers with their laptops partaking of the free bandwidth.

David and I looked around, bought and sent some postcards, bought a Niue flag (it is very unusual: its main color is bright yellow with the Union Jack in the upper left), checked out a few of the memorials, got some great pictures of the limestone cliffs, and went back to the ship .

The captain has been trying to prepare the passengers for crossing the International Date Line during the night. He offered two explanations:

1.       The ship was going to become a time capsule and move a day into the future; or

2.       We could listen to his 45 minute talk on the significance of the Prime Meridian at Greenwich and the discovery, when Magellan returned from his first circumnavigation of the earth, that all his ships’ logs were a day off, and how the International Date Line was established to counteract that. He went into the earth having 360 degrees, divided into sections of 15 for time zones, and even brought in the variations in the International Date Line for Siberia, the Aleutians, the Cook Islands and Samoa, until nearly everyone on the ship decided they preferred explanation 1.

The show tonight was a comedian, but the biggest laugh of the night went to Bruce, the cruise director when he told us that he hoped we would sleep well tonight, and when we woke up in the morning “it will be an entirely new day.” When everyone started laughing, he stood there for a minute with a funny look on his face until he realized what he had said. He then reiterated the “No Wednesday, no February 2” reminder.