NYE 2009

White's Beach

My New Year’s Eve was both awesome and ridiculous and bad. We went to a beach that was in the Broken National Reserve called White's Beach. Since Kate and Laurie both had to work early on New Year's Day, we had arranged with the Canadian couple who invited us and also had to work in the morning, to get a ride there and back that night from them. Problem of them getting back for work in time solved, it was our biggest issue of going to this beach that was out of town. To get to this beach we had to drive quite far into the park and were beginning to think it was going to be deserted but when we pulled up to the parking area it was packed. We got there around 7pm just when the sun was starting to set and it was absolutely beautiful. The surf was pretty good and there were some surfers there who later left as darkness fell and then there was another group of people with a big campfire going. Our group had maybe a dozen people in it.

Our alcove

Anyway, we started drinking and having a good time and it was good times all around. The stars were incredibly bright and most of us stared at them for most of the night. The natural beauty/wonder of this place was pretty wicked/indescribable. We all felt lucky and glad that we'd come to celebrate the New Year there. Once it got dark we discovered that there were phosphorescent algae or something all in the sand and in the water. So when you kicked up the sand it would kind of glow or waded through the water it would glow too.

There were these twins there, Brod and Darcy, and they claimed to be able to read auras. They said mine was blue, like a tree. Hilarious. I learned later that they were on mushies.

Diva having her aura read...

The other group on the beach were a bunch of old hippies. One of them was a fire twirler and that was cool. So we went over and mingled with them a little. They had drums and a guitar and a flute and played some forest fairy tunes. I thought they were kinda lame.
Midnight came and I got my wish of the first thing that I did this year being to jump in the ocean. At this point Kate was off somewhere with a boy, and the couple who was our ride wanted to leave. We started yelling for Kate and she showed up just as we were starting to climb the stairs (big winding pathway up a cliff basically) but Diva was so loss-of-motor-skills drunk that she could barley walk, let alone climb those stairs in the dark. Diva and I said we would stay and get a ride back with the others in the morning. Diva had also misplaced her phone at this point and we were going to rely on someone staying the night to find it and then return it, but us staying sort of solved this problem too (we found it in daylight, after it had beeped of waiting messages and dying batteries all night).

So the two of us continued to drink and party and have a good time and that’s when the bad shit started to happen. First I started to puke from drinking too much and mixing it with too many Doritos (Thanksgiving weekend party all over again). A bit later I was puking the rest of my guts out, by now there wasn't much coming up, and I saw Diva walk by, so I went to check on her and when I got to where she was, like around some rocks, she was lying on the ground with her bikini bottoms around her knees and a bloody lip/nose! She'd been trying to pee and somehow smashed her face on the rocks in the process. We got her pants up and I made her open her mouth to make sure she hadn't broken her teeth again and she hadn't, her face broke her fall this time. This was all by the light of my cellphone. We walked back to the fire and gave her some ice from an eskie, a cooler, but there wasn't much left by then. There wasn't much blood and we wiped it up, me and this aura twin, with the only clean thing we could find- a slice of bread! and Diva was pretty upset and kept saying it hurt. I told her to go to sleep and kept insisting it would be fine. So we tired to sleep, but it was freeeezing, and the surf was so loud. I probably only slept an hour or 2. All I wanted was the sun to come up and to be warm. I kept thinking “I’m going to get hypothermia and die on a beach in Australia in the middle of summer, WTF!” After giving up on sleep I watched the sun rise, as did the twins, and a few people got up and left that I didn't really know. I checked on Diva and her upper-lip was so swollen and looked painful. Poor Divs. We sat around and warmed up and watched a few hippies wonder out of their area in the nude to do yoga by the water. A few surfers showed up as well. Then we cleaned up the garbage and empties and went back up the cliff stairs and our friend Dane drove us home (Dane looks kinda like Doogie Howser).

When we got home we went to bed for a few hours, and were woken around noon by the heat, it was a hot one, like 37 humidex. And then Diva got up to take a shower and was trying to clean the blood off her face and apparently fainted a bit in the bathroom and then was walking in the hall back to the room and then fainted for real. All I heard was a big thump. We figure the sight of her face and the blood gave her a bit of a shock. So she had some water and laid back down. She had an ice pack on her face all morning and the swelling was going down slowly. There are a few nicks but the big cuts are a scrape on her nose tip and above her upper lip. It's not pretty but seems to be healing well. Kate brought us some pies home from work and they pretty much cured my hangover… maybe that’s why Aussie’s can drink so much- pies.
Later in the day I went for a short swim hoping to cool down, but the water was as warm as the air, so no dice. Then we had baked brie and went to bed early.

In other news, the stripper drama continues. It was pretty bad New Year's Day, she apologized about it yesterday, saying she was so out of it the day before and couldn’t remember anything. MESSY. She started puking when I was downstairs yesterday morning and mid-vomit her son said to her “That's why you shouldn't drink so much beer." He’s not even 5 yet.