A green wine bottle covered in barnacles washed up on the NSW Far South Coast revealing a farewell letter from far-off lands. Logan Russell, 14, discovered the mysterious message while exploring Disaster Bay beach with his family on Sunday, December 3 and collecting rubbish that had washed in from the recent swirling and severe seas. "Mum told me to go pick up this bottle because we were collecting rubbish off the beach, and then I saw this other bottle, so I went and picked it up and it had a note in it," Logan said. Logan was elated to find the wine bottle lying on the sand and, in anticipation for what was inside, anxiously twisted the rusted-shut lid. Through the strain in opening it, he accidentally dropped the bottle, which cracked into shards of glass on the ground. A scroll of ripped, thin, white paper hiding within had been slightly damaged from moisture during its journey bobbing in the expansive Pacific Ocean. That voyage was potentially 8000km or more given the note was found to be written in Chinese. "I got a bit happy and excited. We tried to translate it but it didn't really work," Logan said. The Chinese characters, which appeared to have been jotted down frantically in a scribbled message using black pen, told the story of a farewell of one person to two former female friends, according to Shi Yang, who was visiting Merimbula from Singapore and helped ACM understand the handwritten note. "Oh, it's written as 'ex-girlfriend', yeah, someone wrote a letter to his ex-girlfriend," he said, before his father, Pang Yan excitedly had a gander. "This first part's [the] address, you know Xi'an which used to be a capital in China, long time back, this is the province and this is the city," Pang Yan said as he pointed at the message. "This is the girl's name Xing Ling Ling, this [means] ex-girlfriend and this is goodbye, and this is another ex-girlfriend's name, and this [says] virgin," he continued. While the note was damaged and torn, their translation of what could still be deciphered read as follows: 1st line: Shaanxi (a province in China), Xi'an (Capital City of Shaanxi) 2nd line: Xing Ling Ling (name of girl) 3rd line: Ex-girlfriend 4th line: Goodbye 5th line: Sun Xin Yu (name of girl) 6th line: Ex-girlfriend 7th line: (Little) Virgin girl The wine bottle was collected alongside other debris, including a toy horse, a beer bottle, a clear plastic bottle, a sauce container, a broken pastel pink thong, and a Chinese apple vinegar bottle. On Monday, December 4, Logan awoke to the news the note had been successfully translated, and upon hearing what the message had to say, his face beamed with a mighty grin as he gained knowledge as to the written contents of the bewildering barnacled bottle. The note's original author is still unknown, as are the ex-girlfriends mentioned.
