Karen's Millennium Photos
"It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine." - REM
New Year's Eve, 1999
Sydney's plan for New Year's Eve included a smaller fireworks show at 9pm (so the kids could see it and be in bed early), the "Harbor Parade of Lights" from 9pm to midnight, the large fireworks display at midnight, and an all-night party at the Domain from midnight to 6am. Below is the Sydney tourist map which outlined the locations of the Sydney New Year's Eve festivities. For reference, the Sydney Harbor Bridge is between numbers 6 and 15, and the Opera House is number 5. Each of the four large red dots is a launching area for the midnight fireworks, the two closest to the Harbor bridge were used during the 9pm fireworks display. The yellow line is the path of the Harbor Parade of Lights, with the black dashed line representing the area where the parade floats would hang out during the midnight fireworks.
The best place to get a good view of both the Harbor Bridge and the Opera House is at Mrs. Maquarie's Chair, which is the point of land labeled number 4 on the map. People were camped out there from very early in the morning on Dec. 31st. I tried many times to talk Andrew into going there, but he refused to spend all day staking out a spot. The entire area around the Opera House (#5 on map), including the Botanical Gradens was closed off as a black-tie, ticketed event. Tickets to be in that area started at $5000 AUS, and included live music and dance performances. A few celebrities were at that event, including the woman who plays Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Most celebrities, however, were at Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise's private party on their yacht somewhere in the harbor (we didn't see it).
Andrew and I ended up finding a great spot to watch the fireworks near the southeast base of the Harbor Bridge (number 6 on the map) in the historic area of Sydney known as "the Rocks." Not a bad location at all considering that we didn't get there until 6 or 7pm. It was crowded, but nowhere near as crowded as we were expecting. Also, we were near tons of food vendors and a line of about 50 port-a-pots that were under the bridge. Sydney was definitely well prepared!
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Andrew and the view to the west - base of the Harbor Bridge. |
Karen and the view to the east - the Opera House is at the back left (somewhat bleached out). |
A restaruant in one of the buildings behind Andrew (in the photo) had live music until midnight, so we got live music and a good view without paying anything for it! You can see from the clothes we were wearing that although it was the middle of summer, Sydney was having cool, rainy weather.
