The line seemed to go forever. We panic a bit wondering what to do. Will we be able to get in? Do we go somewhere else? The plan has always been to get into Mrs. Macquaries Point. So Brian decided walked the length of the line and determine if we thought we would be able to get in. He did this to estimate how many people were in front of us. It was 1700 paces (steps) long. Based on this, he estimated the line was about 1.2 kilometers long (0.75 miles or 4000 feet). It was the longest line we had ever seen. The photo only shows about one quarter of the total line or so! We stood in that line to get in for 4 hours!
It was hot and sunny. Not like our New Years back home. Luckily we packed an umbrella and used it to block the sun. While in line, we met a girl, Rebecca, who lives in Sydney but her cousin was in town from London so they decided to go to the best spot to ring in the New Year. We talked with her off an on during our 4 hour wait and learned more about the Australian culture. Per her recommendation, we bought Vegemite to try with bread. It is common in Australia although not frequently liked by foreigners like us. We will see (we since bought some to try it).
After four hours, we were at the front of the line and we got in. We were very excited. We walked around a bit to find a good place to set up our towel as a placeholder (we bought it at Kmart in Blue Mountains for this night only). By this time, all the very best spots were taken but we were still able to see the Opera House and the Bridge but a few trees obstructed the view a bit. That was the best we could do.
In Mrs. Macquaries Point, they had food stands set up. We got a pizza for dinner. A $12 pizza and was only 1/3 of size of a normal pizza. Oh well, at least we had something other than granola bars. After dinner, sun was setting in the city and this is what it looked like:
At 9:00pm they had family fireworks. We sat in our spot. They were only about 5-10 minutes and not that great really. But we learned that near the time of the show, they stopped policing the walkways. You normally weren’t allowed to stand there, but they gave up yelling at people during the fireworks. This was a valuable observation we made for the big midnight display.
So we decided to abandon our towel and hoped we could get lucky enough to end up in a walkway that featured an unobstructed view. Luckily we did. We had a perfect spot to ring in the New Year. It was crowded there at that time but we were okay with that. It reminded us of Times Square on New Years Eve. The show was spectacular. It was a magical thing to witness. Here is a video from youtube. We have our video too but we have not uploaded it yet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfwvyTPQtb4
After the show, we headed back to find a bus. It was a bit of a challenge since three different officials told us three different things but we finally found our bus. They estimated that there were 1.25 million people in Sydney for the fireworks. They were not letting traffic leave the city until 1:00am because of the bridge fireworks. We got on the second bus back to our hotel. We were in our room at 2:00am.
Our flight was at 7:00am to Cairns so we were up at 4:00am to shower and go to the airport. Yes, that is only 2 hours of sleep! On the way to the airport, our GPS system got us lost in downtown. Oh, it was terrible. There was one point when I thought we were going to miss our flight. Fortunately I saw street signs and got us back on track. We made it to the airport on time. Plus, all 3 of our bags were less than 20kg. I am very impressed with that!
Off to Cairns we go!
No comments:
Post a Comment