Roller Coaster Ride Down Under: NYE 2013

This year we were fortunate to be in town for NYE, and since we are paying absurdly high Sydney rent year round to live near the harbour we were definitely going to take advantage of the location for the annual fireworks show.

People rant and rave about how good the fireworks are in Sydney, and with the exception of New Zealand they pretty much kick off New Years Eve celebrations for the entire globe with their explosive extravangza. Lets put it this way... they were right, we were not disappointed.

At the end of our street there is a park where there is a pretty good vantage point where you can see both the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. We heard that the area gets really busy on NYE, at the begining of December we received a notice in the mail basically showing all the road closures and restricted areas near us. The flyer also went on to say that the street would be closed to residents and visitors after it hits a capacity of 15,000. Thats a lot of people to cram into a tiny park. So taking all this information in we decided to make sure we secured a good spot, there was no way we waited this long just to have a blocked view.

We were surprised the day before NYE when a few tents popped up, so we decided to order some pizza and save a spot, if it didn't get too busy we'd pack up and come back early in the morning. We set up around 5pm and saved a good chunk of space. Shortly after a news reporter came by and I made it onto the Nine News channel for my 15 minutes of fame (actually it was probably closer to 2min, I'm not sure but did receive a few phones calls and texts from people surprised to see me on the telly).

After eating, playing a few games and reading we had only killed a few hours. However, long story short we were glad that we secured a water front unobstructed view because by 9pm the day before NYE there were a row of tents 2 deep along the water and by the morning of NYE the park looked pretty full. By noon it was standing room only and by 5pm I think they started to shut of the street due to capacity issues. There had to be way more than 15,000 people by then. The line up for the washroom was about 2+ hours long (thats with 3 porta-cabin washroom sites with 5-15 stalls each). Luckily we could still access our place and used it during the day (it was a life saver for us and our guests).

I'm also happy we got to sleep out there, I got one of my best shots of the bridge around 5am, which is now printed and on the wall. Besides we would have been sleeping on the floor in the flat anyway (since we had Mom/Dad over).

We were lucky this year, by the end of the night we had about 20-25 people in the spot we secured, including Mom/Dad, our visiting friends Tammy and Wouter (who also gave us a shout out on their blog), Anubhai/Pravina Bhabhi/Luke, and some local Sydney friends (including more visiting Canadians).

Now onto the pictures: