Bondi Bound

To help cheer us up from our employment woes we decided to get back to basics and why we came to Australia in the first place; to travel and enjoy the sunshine. We had already been to Manly, so we thought we would head to Sydney’s (and possibly Australia’s) most iconic beach – Bondi Beach. For any of you Bondi Rescue fans out there, we were going to keep an eye out at the Lifeguard Station for Hoppo, Kerrbox and the rest of the lifeguard gang.

Classic tourist behaviour...

    

We had bought a $51 a week multi ticket pass that allowed us to travel by bus, train and ferry through Sydney. So we headed down to Burwood Station and caught a train to Bondi Junction (via a transfer at Redfern) where we then caught a bus to Bondi Beach; a journey that only took 45 minutes or so; not bad.

We soon spotted one of our favourite shops – Ben & Jerry’s – but were aghast to find that for one scoop of ice cream it would cost $5.40 so we sensibly controlled our ice cream cravings and headed onto the beach. We soon saw the Lifeguard Station and had a look for any of the lifeguards we recognised from the Bondi Rescue programme but unfortunately we couldn’t spot any. Still, a lifeguard quad drove past that could have been driven by Hoppo or Kerrbox…

The beach itself was nice, it was quite busy and the sea was really cold but there were still plenty of swimmers and surfers. We saw one surfer who was particularly impressive spinning his board around 360 degrees and putting everyone else to shame. That was cool, but in the main the surfers were tourists having surfing lessons.

We spent a bit of time soaking up the sun on the beach before walking along the coastal path that links Bondi to two beaches to the south; Tamarama and Bronte. We first came to Tamarama beach after walking along a path with outstanding views of Bondi and the coast. As a point of interest, Tamarama and Bondi have two of the oldest surf lifesaving clubs in Australia. Tamarama beach was not so nice as Bondi, it was smaller and there were large rock formations near the coast which made the waves break nicely for surfing, but it made the sea hard to swim in – we saw one lad run to dive into the sea and as he dived into the wave he was knocked backwards a yard or two; hilarious but an indicator of how strong the waves were.

As seen on Australian Dulux advert

We followed the coastal path to Bronte where the beach was a little bigger than Tamarama but still not as big as Bondi. It was lovely, quieter and a nice place to head if you didn’t want the crowds that Bondi attracts. The sea didn’t seem as strong as Tamarama so I think if we were to head somewhere to relax in the future, it would be Bronte over Bondi. We were getting a little tired by this point in the day as we had done quite a lot of walking and traveling so we caught the bus back to Bondi Junction and started our journey back to our house in Concord.