The Chatham Islands may just be your destination you like total isolation and total wilderness. Located east of the South Island, the ‘Chathams’, as they are affectionately known, is approximately a 1 ¾ hour flight from Wellington or Christchurch!

Chatham Islands (2000) 15 Dollars - This is play money only, not legal tender!!

The distance that separates the islands from the mainland puts Chatham Islands 45 minutes ahead of standard New Zealand time, and a close look at the international dateline shows that the Chathams are the first to see the light of every new day!! - a fact that made the islands famous at the time of the new millennium.

With a declining population of just under 700 and an extremely exposed but temperate climate, the Chatham Islands really are the 'last place on earth'! However, the contrast of rugged coastlines and towering cliffs, volcanic peaks, lagoons and peat bogs, empty beaches, remote farms, wind-stunted vegetation and dense patches of forest makes the Chathams a mysterious and wild adventure.
The Chatham Islands are renowned for being the last home of the Moriori, their peaceful existence coming to an end in the 1820’s and 1830’s as European and American whalers and sealers began to arrive, not to mention Maori tribes from the mainland. The Moriori are believed to be Polynesians who sailed to the islands from New Zealand between 900AD and 1500AD and since the first arrival of a European in 1791 the population of Moriori dwindled from around 2000 to only 100 by the 1860’s. By the beginning of the 20th century, there were just 12 full-blooded Moriori left, a result of killing, enslavement and interbreeding with the Maori tribes who took over the islands. There are now believed to be over 300 Moriori descendants and today Moriori, Maori and Pakeha (Europeans) live together as Chatham Islanders.

Source:New Zealand's Information Network
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Chatham Islands Banknote - Play Money only!!

In 1999 the Reserve Bank of New Zealand authorized a private organization, the Chatham Islands Note Corporation, to issue banknotes to celebrate that the Chatham Islands would have been the first land to enter the third millennium of the common era (although this is not actually true - this honour belongs to Antarctica. The first island to enter the third millennium would be Millennium Island).
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand gave this authorization under the condition that such notes cannot be declared legal tender. In other words, these notes were to be used for payment, but only if the seller accepted them: there was no obligation for anyone to accept the notes issued by the Chatham Islands, contrarily to the notes issued by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. These Chatham Islands notes were generally accepted by merchants on the Chatham Islands.

The Chatham Islands Note Corporation was initially based in Christchurch, New and moved later to Waitangi, Chatham Islands.

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand clarified that Chatham Islands dollars are not legal tender. In particular, Reserve Bank Deputy Governor Murray Sherwin said:

"These so-called Chatham Island dollars are harmless as a promotional gimmick and as a bit of fun. Also, if people want to use them to undertake transactions, that's fine too, just as one can pay for a service with monopoly play money, sea shells, or bottles of beer, if the seller is happy to receive them...."

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "History of Chatham Islands numismatics"