Tracy was woken at 6am by the planes going over and the rest of us were all awake by just before 7am. There were some clouds in the sky but it looked like it was going to be a lovely day and the beach looked like it had been freshly ploughed (which as it turned out it had been; or at least raked).
As we had a city based day yesterday, today was going to be more water/beach focused. By 9am we had had breakfast, got dressed and taken a short cab ride to Bondi. The plan was to relax for a while on the beach and then walk the 6 kms back to Coogee along the coastal path.
Bondi is quite underwhelming for such a world famous beach. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very nice beach – similar to Great Yarmouth as Tracy pointed out – but you sort of expect more when you arrive. It has a lovely sweeping sandy beach with grass behind that and then a range of Victorian buildings across the road from that. I suppose you could argue that Great Yarmouth is even better than Bondi because it has a pier. But then you could probably say that Bondi has the weather, beautiful clear sea, warm sea, great waves for surfing and people doing yoga! And on New Year’s Day it has about 30,000 people on it – it looks horrific!!
The people on Bondi clearly love themselves very much! They like to stand at the waters edge stretching before they start surfing. They like to jog along the waters edge showing everyone how fit they are. They like to stand on the path at the back of the beach doing all sorts of yoga moves. There was also one old man doing some sort of strange dance type manoeuvres which I assume he thought was yoga or he was just drunk. Anyway, maybe it is the people that make Bondi so interesting and famous. Whatever it was we took a few minutes to enjoy some people watching, have a splash in the sea and then we set off on our walk.
As we walked the coastal path we spent some time educating the boys to have some spatial awareness and keep out of the way of the many joggers. I’m not sure they learnt much. I also spent some time debating with Toby about whether it would be better to put his sandy feet into his crocs or to walk bare footed and step on some glass. It’s amazing how long it takes to have what you would think is a reasonably straight forward conversation. His conclusion was, believe it or not, that sandy feet inside crocs is worse than stepping on glass.
The next beach we arrived at was Tamarama or Glamarama as the locals call it (according to the cab driver anyway). Tracy did find out the name of someone famous who lives there but I can’t remember who. It was a small little cove but very nice. All the houses round here cost upwards of a couple of million (this interesting fact was, again, supplied by the cab driver).
There was no stopping at this beach though, we had to try and get back to Coogee before the midday sun burnt us all to a crisp! Going round the next headland bought us to Bronte beach. We’d been walking for about 45 minutes and had worked up a bit of a sweat so we stopped for slush puppies and water. Inspired by all the fitness freaks running the coastal path we decided to join them and had egg and bacon rolls and sausages in a roll, cooked fresh on the beach side barbecue. It was proper bacon and the sausages were almost English in quality too.
Fully refreshed we set off again, heading this time towards Clovelly. This beach was different to the rest. It was much more narrow and the water was calm due to some creative concrete edges. Apparently it is a good place to start snorkelling as the waters are shallow, calm and there are some cool looking fish in there too. We didn’t go in the water though as Toby was concerned about the Blue Bottles or Blue Bubbles as he preferred to call them. To be fair there were quite a lot of the little stingers around, washed up on the sand but there was no need to be so dramatic! In fact the good thing about them is that they made a rather nice popping sound when trodden on (fortunately I had my sandals on at the time).
The walk continued past Clovelly and onto Coogee, where we arrived just before midday, all suitably sweaty. The beach was busy but not overwhelmingly so, so we walked along to the bit monitored by the life guards and went in to the water to cool off. As lovely as it was Toby was still reluctant to go in the water because of the blue bubbles. Harry had no such problems and was soon leaping over waves with me. After a few minutes Tracy took Toby up to the hotel pool as he wasn’t happy at the beach. Harry and I played a little longer but we soon joined them. Jumping waves was fun but not that good when your shorts keep falling down! I knew I should have bought some new ones before we left America! The shorts should fit again by the end of the holiday as I have eaten like a big fat pig but I don’t think this should stop me from buying some new ones for the summer season!
The lounged by the pool until mid afternoon and then it was time for a quick tidy up before Jeremy and his family took us into Sydney for the late afternoon/evening. First stop was Darling Harbour and the kids water park. We hadn’t got as far as this yesterday on our exploration so it s good to go there now. Harry, Toby and Stella spent some time playing and getting soaked before we dried the off and went to have dinner in a nice South African steak and ribs restaurant.
After stuffing ourselves silly, we went next door into the English sweet shop and stocked up on supplies like Picnic bars, Double Deckers, Refreshers and Palma Violets. After spending a fortune on not very much, we walked back to the car and drove back to Coogee. Once again, we were all exhausted from the fresh sea air and we all collapsed into bed and watched TV before falling asleep.
They’re hard work these holidays!
Here are the pictures from the day…