Bleak and windswept, New Zealand's Chatham Islands are a place that time forgot - and then remembered again in a blaze of media attention. For one night only, a geographic twist of fate put these remote islands in the ranks of New York, London or Paris as a hot ticket destination.
Usually it is the island's wildlife and wildness that draws a steady stream of hardy visitors to its 66 tourist beds. With extra tented and homestay accommodation, that night the island's population soared.
Returnees, press and a different breed of millennium tourist flew in from as far away as Europe and America, some even by private jet, to these isles at the edge of time.
Eight hundred kilometres and a crucial 45 minutes ahead of New Zealand, the countdown to the new millennium started on the Chathams before the timekeeper of the Greenwich Observatory had poured a mid-morning cup of tea on December 31.
Unlike Pacific rival Kiribati, the Chathams are no place for grass-skirts and bikinis. An hour's drive over rough tracks and peat bogs, islanders and outsiders massed at a cliff-top site peppered with wild sheep, TV crews and cow pats. There, watched by the world, the islanders would claim their moment as the first legitimately inhabited place to witness the dawn of 2000.
Being in the right place at the right time brought a brief bonanza to the islands. The size of the SAR but with just 700 residents, Chatham Island hardly seemed overcrowded. The islanders like it that way. With a hotel reservation required to secure a flight, visitors are not allowed to arrive unannounced.