Bondi Beach - it's Beaut! (Bondi Beach (Sydney, Australia))

Member Name: koshkha

Product:	Bondi Beach (Sydney, Australia)
Date:	31/08/09 (82 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to get to by public transport

Disadvantages: Many are disappointed that it really is 'just a beach'.

When I was seven years old my not long widowed mother decided to take me and my sister to Australia for the summer to visit her brothers who'd both emigrated to Sydney about 10 years earlier. They had been 'Ten Pound Poms', just two of the many people who'd fled the miserable drabness of early 1960s Britain to build a new life in the sun. Mum still has photos and some jerky cine-film of my sister and me in our swimsuits (mine had a little frilled skirt on it - can you imagine?) running around a totally empty Bondi Beach, with no more than a solitary baffled looking dog-walker wrapped in coat and scarf watching us in the distance. We were, as she tells it, the only three people on Bondi's massive beach that day because no Australian would want to be on Bondi in the middle of the winter.

This year we went back - my mother and step-father inviting me and my husband, my sister and her partner to go with them. My uncle had sold his house in Bondi for a small fortune and moved to another suburb of Sydney and Mum wanted to make a small pilgrimage back to see the old house and visit the beach.

One of the reasons that Bondi Beach is so popular with Sydney dwellers is that you can reach it very easily by public transport. It's at the end of a train line and easily accessible from the city centre and the suburbs. That's why my uncle and aunt's rather decrepit and falling down old place had clocked them a very healthy AU$1.6 million - the people who bought it were not just buying a 'project', they were buying into what they called 'The Bondi Lifestyle' and they were willing to pay through the nose to have it. You could be forgiven for thinking that an £800k house implies some paradise of beach front idyll but you'd be wrong. The only thing you can see from their house is big sweaty men running round the park playing rugby.

We took the train from my uncle's place in the south of the city straight to Bondi Junction. My mother was in charge that day and we accepted her suggestion that it would be a good idea to walk from the station to the beach, passing the old house on the way, and even though it would be quite a long way her philosophy was that the walk would do us good and walking down would be a lot easier than walking up the hill on the way back. Unfortunately it all went a bit awry when we walked a mile or two in completely the wrong direction, thanks to Mum getting a bit confused about the way.

We'd asked a lady in the town centre which way we should go to the beach and she'd said "Take the bus". The idea of walking seemed completely alien to her and when we said we wanted to walk she said "Then follow the bus". We went totally the wrong way and I soon realised that my lousy sense of direction was probably genetic.

Most people won't walk down to the beach and they have no real need to since there's a frequent bus service from the Bondi Junction railway station that will whisk them there in a few minutes. As we plodded down the long sweeping hill, surrounded by bars, restaurants and all sorts of weird little shops selling stuff you don't really need, I couldn't help but think that if this was 'The Bondi Lifestyle' it wasn't so different from living in any hub of student accommodation. Was the Bondi lifestyle one of round the clock doner kebabs and shops selling incense? Heading down the hill to the beach we were passed in the opposite direction by bare-footed bare-chested wetsuit half-clad young guys with surfboards. Did they really want to walk or was it just a great way to show off a good six pack and impress the ladies? Or perhaps more realistically there's nowhere to keep your bus money in a wetsuit.

Eventually the hill curves round and you catch your first glimpse of the sea and the kilometer long curve of the beach. Old hotels which were once grand but are now a bit faded line the street. The walking boots airing on the window sills and glimpses of bunk beds suggested that many are now budget backpacker haunts. A little further and the curve opens out to show a long blonde crescent of sandy beach with a second emerald crescent of lawns behind. That's one of the nicest things about Bondi; you don't have to lie and play on the sand, you can use the grass instead if you prefer.

We arrived late afternoon in August and it was quite windy. As Brits we thought the weather was lovely and sunny but clearly the locals thought it was a very chilly day and were wrapped up warm. Sunbathers on the beach? We saw none at all, ditto for swimmers. The only people in the water were the surfers, clad in their thick wetsuits to keep out the worst of the cold. The waves didn't seem too rough but were clearly good enough to entertain a couple of hundred surfers on a Sunday afternoon and watching them glide along (and fall off) was a pleasant distraction for half an hour or so.

At one end of the beach is a sea-water pool that offers an enclosed and calm body of water for those who want to swim lengths or just avoid the waves. Our guidebook told us that the 'brave' souls of the Icebergs Winter Swimming club take to the waters year round but we couldn't see there was that much bravery involved if this was as cold as it got. We've dived in 17C off the south coast of England and would argue that THAT's cold and those funny folks who break the ice on the Serpentine to swim at Christmas are a lot more hardy than the Icebergers.

We walked about half the length of the paved walkway between the sand and the grass before turning back with thoughts of getting a drink from one of the bars on the front. We stopped for about 15 minutes to watch the hard-core skateboarders practicing their moves in the skate park (and to watch some spectacular falls too, of course) before heading off for smoothies (of the drink kind, not the young men on the pull type) on the front. Having already walked considerably futher than we should have, we bought tickets for the bus back to Bondi Junction and as the sun set over one of the world's most famous beaches, we joined the surfers and skateboarders on the ride back to the station.

If you are expecting Bondi to be a classy sophisticated beach as might befit it's reputation as one of the world's most famous beaches, you'll probably find it's a bit more Bournemouth and a bit less Copacoban than you'd imagine. If you are looking for a pleasant swim and somewhere for the kids to paddle, it's probably a bit too rough. However, if you want a nice long patch of pristine sand where nobody will sting you a fortune for a sunbed (because there aren't any) and you won't pay silly prices for a beer at a bar on the front, it's a very pleasant place to visit. However, having seen pictures of it in the summer months when it looks like Oxford Street on the first day of the January sales, I'm glad we went in the depths of winter.

Summary: You couldn't really go to Sydney and NOT go to Bondi.