A message in a bottle written eight years ago by three Bay Area women has washed ashore in Australia. A group of hikers found the bottle and the message in some rubbish during a beach cleanup in Townsville, Australia. Inside the bottle was a note dated July 2016. It was tossed in the ocean in Navini, Fiji, by the three women on their last day of vacation. The message included a return address, prompting the hikers to launch an international search. “She looked up the address in California, in Sunnyvale, and it turned out that the home had actually sold back in 2018, so we hit a brick wall there,” Susie Bidgood said. NBC Bay Area picked up the search and located the three close friends. “I was just getting out of class and I was just on my phone,” Savannah Green said. “Then I saw the email from Janice and I texted five different people because I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is crazy.’ Especially because they found it all the way in Australia.” A picture of Green taken eight years ago shows her holding the bottle before they dropped it in the ocean. After her family moved away from their Sunnyvale home, she said she forgot all about the bottle until recently when the three friends went back to Fiji. “Just in August we were there again leaving Navini in their boat again and I remember saying, ‘No one’s found our bottle,'” Janice Pierce said. “And yet here we are two months later.” The Australian hikers and the “Sunnyvale Three” quickly found each other online. “Before we knew it, Sandra was having a conversation via Instagram messages with Savannah, and it was just very exciting,” Bidgood said. The story has been picked up by Australian media and gone viral on social media. “It’s kind of a little bit wild at the moment,” Sandra Lamari said. “It’s gotten a lot of traction lately, but it’s really good. It is a fantastic news story. This is really what the world needed. The whole world needs right now a little bit of positivity.” The three friends from Sunnyvale said during that first trip to Fiji they were bringing donations to a nearby village that had been devastated by a recent hurricane. They now have plans to visit Australia to hopefully meet their new friends who found their message in a bottle.