Ride the lil guys to Manly Beach

8 April, 2023 | Sydney, Australia

So first off I woke up like this.

Having mostly exhausted the standard museums and sights in Sydney, and failing to make plans for Melbourne (next time), I decided to go hit up the sunny beaches of the area.

The first stop was Manly Beach. Apparently so called because an early British explorer was, uh, taken by the manliness of the indigenous people of the area.

“Their confidence and manly behaviour made me give the name of Manly Cove to this place"

- Capt. Arthur Phillip, visibly sweating (probably)

Going to Manly Beach is as simple as hoping on the most adorable ferries this side of an animated series for children from Circular Quay.

The beach is lovely but honestly the ride over was the highlight. You circle almost entirely around the Sydney Opera House and cannot reasonably get a better view of the bridge without being airborne.

I have almost zero good pictures of Manly Beach, because it’s mostly a tourist trap. Or at least the main drag was.

I did buy a physical book at a used book store: In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson1. There are a lot of used book stores in Australia - as Bryson notes in his book - as new books and video games are/were considerably more expensive than other places.

The very next day I went to Bondi Beach, a recommendation by Robert and my cousins. Now this place I was quite taken with - I went back twice.

I laid out on the beach, read my physical book a bit, and slathered on what turns out was a mostly sufficient amount of suntan lotion. I saw that folks felt safe leaving their stuff while they went to swim, so - ignoring everything I had ever read about the 987345 creatures in the oceans around Australia that can kill you instantly - I waded into the water.

It was warm. And unlike the mostly tame waters of the Puget Sound I am used to, these waves crashed into you with force. In other beaches I recall having fun resisting, but some of these were beyond the kind of inertia I can bring to bear.

It was not long before I realized why so many life guards were there, and why they were very insistent on everyone staying confined to a small area between two prominent flag poles.

In 1967 Harold Holt, Prime Minister of Australia, disappeared while swimming in the sea near Victoria. Despite a massive search attempt, no sign of him was ever found. They just up and lost a whole ass Prime Minister. From Wikipedia:

Several of Holt's friends confronted him about the dangers of his hobby, including his press secretary, Tony Eggleton, to whom Holt responded, "Look Tony, what are the odds of a prime minister being drowned or taken by a shark?"

The witness recounted seeing Holt being pulled out to sea, which is the principal worry on these beaches - the “rips” or rip currents. Not to be confused with rip tides, rip currents are caused by waves and will typically push you parallel to the shore when close into the beach, and then pull you back out. They are, by far, the thing that is most likely to kill you on an Australian beach.

I actually felt that parallel-to-the-shore pull, and I can tell others could as well. A lifeguard waved at us to get between the flags - I had not even realized I had drifted north beyond it. We were fine. There are few beaches more actively patrolled than this one. And I would highly encourage visiting. Just stay within those flags and it’s not a bad idea to learn the signs of rip currents and how to escape from them.

"So if you're standing on the beach it's really important to look at the surf for five or 10 minutes and if you start seeing these persistent dark gaps that look like paths - they can go straight, they can go at angles - chances are that's a rip current."

After the beach I went to Newtown - an area still in the relatively early stages of gentrification. It’s bar scene had been giving a shot in the arm, as they were not included in the (pre-COVID) lockouts targeting inebriated violence. I ended up being that nerd reading a book in a big pub that eventually turned into a dance club.

I would have stayed longer, maybe even danced, but (1) it seemed more like the kind of place where you bring a group of friends and mostly stick together and (2) I was running out of power and didn’t relish trying to navigate home without a map. The next day though, I will find a bar more to my style and circumstances.