Australia Day is celebrated on the 26th of January. This year, was extra special for me and my family. We decided to celebrate it at Bondi Beach (that's about 35 minutes commute from Sydney's CBD). We have also decided to take part in the Havaianas Thongs Challenge and hopefully go in the books for a world record. Registration and collection of the giant inflatable thongs starts at 8:00a.m. so we packed early for our trip.
First in the agenda was to set up camp. We brought along our Aussie flag tent, just in case it gets really hot later in the day.
Then we collected our Havaianas. Of course they came in Aussie colours. In Australia, this is one day everybody gets into the spirit of being patritotic and gets to show off their Aussie printed hats, shirts, towels, board shorts, bikinis, capes, esky, tent what have you.
We hit the water just as soon as we got our inflatables. The water was really cool. It was a nice respite from the three week heatwave we had in Sydney.
At noon, the Havaianas Thongs Challenge 2013 was on! Everybody who registered on time (some online, some on the day) hit the waves. The first group to brave the cool waters were the elite swimmers followed by the above average and then the average swimmers. It was such a nice picture. It's the highlight of the day. Imagine the thousands of thongs floating like some swarm of bees or school of fishes. The object of the challenge was for everybody to stay afloat and get connected to each other as the headcount begins. This was done in other parts of Australia and the beach with the most number of people gets the title.
Later, Havaianas announced that Bondi Beach had a record of 2070 participants and was defeated by Cottesloe Beach in the West Coast with 2093. Well, if you are with me, let's do it in 2014 and beat Cottesloe's record.
