It was a bit cloudy, but otherwise there were no signs of impending Armageddon at the Captain Cook Hotel in Kiritimati on Saturday morning, the first day of the end of the world.

The hotel is a bucolic paradise of 20 thatched-roofed bungalows on the beach of a Pacific atoll at the farthest end of the international dateline, where each day begins.

The weather was warm, staff reported at about 4 a.m. Saturday their time, and the day promised to turn fine once the clouds cleared.

For anyone wanting to meet the Rapture head-on, there were a few rooms available.

They were, of course, still half a day shy of the actual hour on Saturday when the world will apparently start to end.

The Rapture, promoted as the beginning of six months of chaos as the world starts to end, was supposed to begin at 6 p.m. local time — which appears to mean 6 p.m. local time Saturday, May 21, in Oakland, Calif., home of Family Radio and doomsday evangelist Harold Camping.

That would be 9 p.m. Toronto time. Or 3 p.m. Sunday, May 22, in Kiritimati, formerly Christmas Island, when it will likely still be warm and bucolic.

Not so in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, one of the farthest eastern spots in Russia. Anastasia Barinova at the three-star Hotel Petropavlovsk outlined the forecast for May 21: “Today will be rain.”

The 2:30 a.m. Saturday temperature at 31 Karl Marx Ave. was 10, nothing unusual for a subarctic spring morning just off the Bering Sea.

Same time zone and same rain forecast but much, much further south sits Auckland, New Zealand, where “Prisoner Admits Killing Inmate” led the New Zealand Herald website.

In Sydney, two hours behind Auckland, the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald reveals the New South Wales government of Premier Barry O’Farrell is in political hot water because of a backlash over the solar bonus scheme, which would cut the price paid to people who fed electricity back into the power grid.

The forecast calls for sunshine, now apparently a slightly less lucrative commodity in Australia.