5, 4, 3, 2, 1...

After the requisite stops at the bottle-o, supermarket and petrol station yesterday, our little convoy headed off down to Kando’s farm near Fitzroy Falls/Kangaroo valley. It was a nice enough drive down the freeway, but once we headed past Bowral the roads had some insanely tight bends which was freaky for passengers like myself whose drivers decided to go round them at 60km/h when the speed limit was 25km/h. Stupid boys and their lead feet.

As we drove on, we were all beginning to wonder when the hell we were actually going to reach the farm. The roads had became dirt tracks and the trees became much more dense. The first thing that came into mind whilst we were going through such thick scrub was how very Tomorrow When the War Began we were being. Hehe. (I think I’ve read those books way too many times).

All of us were under the impression that Kando’s farm would be your stereotypical Australian farm, with the big paddock, quaint little house, a shed and perhaps some animals. We were so wrong. The farm infact did not have a paddock or any animals, it is actually located in a rainforest. Yes, a rainforest. It seriously looked like someone had just moved a large, two storey house from the city into a bunch of trees. One side of the house was bordered by a cliff with a small waterfall and creek!

I fell in love with the place immediately. It was just so perfect, a hidden getaway spot where you could get completely swept up by the natural beauty of the place. The back of the house had a little bonfire spot with logs, a wood BBQ area and a smaller guest cabin. I don’t know why she calls it a farm because it's more like a holiday house.

Once we entered the house there was a mad dash to claim the beds. After much fuss, we figured we’d let the three couples take the three bedrooms and the rest of us would just crash on the mattresses on the floor. Once that was settled we started unloading the rest of our crap, managing to fill two fridges- one with food, the other with drinks. We kind of went overboard on supplies considering we were only staying one night, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared. Since it was raining slightly we figured it would be safe to light the bonfire and proceeded to heat up the BBQ for dinner. Much drinking, eating, dancing, (really bad) singing and games of pool were done to fill in time til midnight.

Getting restless, we decided to play the animal sound drinking game. I had never heard of this game til last night, and it’s different than your usual drinking game where the person who stuffs up is the only one who has to drink because in this game when someone stuffs up, everyone has to down their drink/do a shot. You can imagine just how messy this game can get. Basically you each pick an animal noise to make and then you go around in a circle so that everyone knows what noise you are. After that the whole group starts to continuously bang the table and then clap their hands in time with each other, whilst you’re clapping someone makes their animal noise and then someone else’s animal noise. If your noise was made then you have to make your noise and then make someone else’s noise without missing a clap/bang. This continues until someone misses their turn or gets confused with the sound/or order of the sounds their supposed to make. It sounds like a retarded game but it’s actually quite fun. The clapping always seems to speed up which makes you confused really easily, thus making people drink every couple of minutes. Let’s just say that I will never forget that sheep go ‘baa’ for a long time…

Just before midnight the boys brought out the fireworks they had bought from Canberra the day before, and proceeded to let them off. Because of the fire ban in the area they didn’t let any of the huge ass rockets off because they didn’t want to get in trouble, but the low flying ones were still really cool. Midnight came and went with a flurry of party poppers and us running around in the rain with sparklers like little kids. Afterwards we gorged ourselves on marshmallows we roasted over the fire. ‘Twas fun.

We were determined to stay up and watch the sunrise, but slowly people headed off to bed where they didn’t get much sleep since the rest of us who were still awake would randomly run into their rooms and jump on top of them/into bed with them. By 3am there were about 7 of us still awake. It was a cack watching Yul and Dan trying to play pool because they were both so trashed, they couldn’t sink any balls and were both trying to talk to each other but they just couldn’t form coherent sentences.

Around 4:30am I was too buggered to stay up any longer and headed off to sleep. I got woken up by something licking my hand, it scared the crap out of me but it was just Kando’s dog Romeo that she had brought along for the night (I want to steal it, it’s a gorgeous, caramel coloured Cocker spaniel). I was one of the first awake, and headed out onto the balcony only to find Yul asleep on the deck chair. I don’t know how he managed to find his way out there but he must have passed out/fallen asleep while waiting to see the sun come up. Not that he would have seen much since it was so foggy. The place really does have a relaxed atmosphere around it, I sat out there for about 30 minutes just watching the rain fall til I noticed a leech crawling on my leg and I ran back inside shrieking, heh.

We were all planning to go trekking through the bush today but it was bucketing down with rain, so we spend the rest of the day playing more games of pool and taking turns of getting saturated by speeding around the property on the quad motorbikes. The boys decided that playing with our mobiles would be a nice way to pass the time, so without our knowledge they decided to send stupid messages to people in our address books. We had realised what they had done by the number of ‘wtf’ and 'please explain' replies we had gotten, and thus we spent the afternoon trying to convince people that we were not insane, in love with them or thought they were sexy. I apologise to people who also got some prank calls from my phone, I pinky swear it wasn’t me! They’ve done this a couple of times now and it’s getting quite annoying. We need to think of a way to get them back.

Despite the mobile phone incident, it was one of the best New Year's that I've head. Beautiful location, hours of laughs and great company, what more could you ask for?
Ear Candy: 'Hear You Me' -- Jimmy Eat World