Andrew Quested
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From The Sunday Times
May 4, 2008
Across Sydney Harbour to Manly
The city’s best-kept secret is a scenic stroll around the bays and beaches of Manly
It’s a bit confusing. A few seconds after ordering a glass of white wine, because red gives me a headache and makes my eyes wobble, the charming young lady I’m dining with tells me to go on a “manly scenic walk”. What’s that supposed to mean? Is she commenting on my captivating combination of ruggedness and soft-centred scenery appreciation? Or is she saying I’m a bit of a wuss?
Turns out it was Manly with a capital M, the swim-between-the-flags suburb on the north side of Sydney harbour and just a pretty half-hour ferry ride out of town. Sydney’s other ocean beaches, Bondi and Coogee, both require you to catch a train or a bus – which just isn’t as much fun.
The Manly Scenic Walkway starts when you get off the ferry and head off in the opposite direction to everybody else. They go straight ahead. You go left. They get to experience that delightful backpacker staple, tat and tattoos (arse antlers being de rigueur down under). You get to experience sparkling bays bobbing with yachts, tucked-away beaches, ancient aboriginal art and luxury beachfront properties nestling beneath palm trees.
The route takes you north from the Manly ferry port and traces a coast of bays and coves that, bit by bit and step by step, spell out the quintessential Sydney lifestyle. It’s like slowly peeling back the tourist-brochure veneer, so teasingly slowly that you can hear the pages unsticking, and discovering the appeal of things you can’t buy tickets for.
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You’ll first come across the deep blue waters of Manly Cove, viewed from a grassy slope and licking a stage of emerald pools among cream-and-copper sandstone flats. Around the next bend there’s one of those iconic bathing pools – a rectangular man-made basin on the water’s edge, within reach of the waves but beyond the reach of sharks and undertows. Go ahead, jump in. It’s safe and free. But be warned that the Aussie ocean is salty, and you’ll have a scratchy back prickling away under your T-shirt for the rest of the day.
Next, you’re walking through suburbs where the air wafts with laughter and the smells from someone’s barbecue. Houses you’d love to own crowd banks that swoop down to more bay views, complete with bobbing yachts with ting-tinging masts.
Around a bend is a public beach. A grassy play area – ideal for a picnic – backs a small, sandy, crescent-shaped bay, ideal for a safe and easy swim: “Race you to that boat and back!” But don’t linger too long here – there’s still quite a way to go.
A wooden walkway guides you into the mysterious shadows of scrubby bits. Gnarled trees contort to catch a dapple of light, and a weak creek tinkles below. It’s like a rainforest in retirement – it can’t be bothered flourishing in the stinking Aussie heat. Joggers clump by and pant a friendly “G’day”.
Suddenly, another beach and another one of those bathing pools – this one smaller and a bit more rugged. Get someone to take a photo of you in it. At the end of the beach, you’ll enter a national park.
No dogs allowed. All traffic on two feet, please.
Soon you’re climbing sandstone steps, carved out of natural history and giving you an early-settler view of the Heads – the gates to Sydney. Stand and watch as the Manly ferry glides by in the distance and, when she’s gone, imagine the sails of the first fleet appearing in the gap. It’s easy to indulge in such mental time travel here because there’s so little sign of modern life. It’s all just hues of blue – the bush, the water, the sky, the flies.
There’s a clearing further along where some old aboriginal drawings are scratched into exposed rock. Little wooden borders have been put up to stop you trampling on them, and there are signs to help visitors from places without weird animals understand what is depicted. The images have been softened by time – by a lot of time, actually – but you can just make out a wallaby. They’re just outlines, really, but they’re a reminder of the past and certainly a more authentic glimpse of aboriginal art than what you find in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, or a boomerang in the gallery shop.
These days, there are plenty of aboriginal people (and some not-so-aboriginal people) unrolling bits of bark and doing paintings of dots. And good on ’em – aboriginals invented pixels and they can make all the pictures out of dots they want. But in Australia, the appreciation of aboriginal art has become a baffling mix of cultural interest, national guilt, outright exploitation and highfalutin tosh. So it’s nice to see something so indisputably, authentically and simply aboriginal.
The national park ends partway along a glorious little beach. I won’t tell you any more about it because, I suspect, someone might kill me for letting out the secret. So I’ll just mention such unrelated observations as “turquoise-blue and opalescent waters” and “accessible only by steep and rickety stairs, so grandads can’t spoil it”.
The walk concludes with a long, loping stroll along yet another beach, this one zipping the gap between actual water and the houses of those who treat money like water. Think grand mansions hunkering haughtily at the back of the beach, like lofty dreams pinned down only by mortgages and palm trees.
Another bay of yachts, a bloke chucking a stick to his dogs across the corrugated low-tide sand, a few more steps, a bit of a park and you’re there. The Spit Bridge crosses overhead, and the thra-dump, thra-dump of tyres over the gaps in the road reminds you that you’re back in civilisation. Climb the bridge and get a bus back to Manly. End the day with a dusk ferry back to the city, where the Harbour Bridge will lace the sunset, and the Opera House will glow pearlescent. They are, after all, beautiful icons of Sydney. But they’re only the sparkling headlines to the real story – the bush, bays, secret beaches and backyards – with which you will now be more familiar. Whether that makes you more manly or not is another matter.
Andrew Quested travelled as a guest of Austravel
Travel brief
The Manly Scenic Walkway is six miles long and takes at least four hours at a gentle pace – or a day if you linger. Good walking shoes and sunscreen are essential. A free map is available from the tourist centre just outside the ferry terminal in Manly. The ferry between Sydney’s central Circular Quay and Manly runs every half hour or so and costs £6 return.
Getting there: fly to Sydney from Heathrow with Qantas (020 8600 4300, www.qantas.com), British Airways (0844 493 0787, www.ba.com) or Virgin Atlantic (0870 380 2007, www.virgin-atlantic.com). Expect to pay from about £800.
Where to stay: harbour-view rooms at the Shangri-La (00 612 9250 6000, www.shangri-la.com) cost from £200. Or try the Four Seasons (00 612 9238 0000, www.fourseasons.com; room-only doubles from £180) or stay right on the beach in Manly at the Sebel (00 612 9977 8866, www.mirvachotels. com; studios from £130).
Tour operators: Austravel (0844 412 4620, www.austravel.com) has five nights in Sydney from £949pp, including Qantas flights from Heathrow and accommodation at the five-star Shangri-La. Or try Bridge & Wickers (020 7483 6555, www. bridgeandwickers.co.uk).
We visited SE Australia last Oct Nov, our daughter livies in Coogee. Having walked around the coast from Coogee to Bondi we thought that was fantastic, Manly WOW blew us away. It was like the all tiny bays of Devon and Cornwall, chained together one after the other with brilliant weather. Go there!
Marie Carr, Upminster , UK
I've visited Sydney so many times on business, that next time i'll have to pack my walking shoes, slap on some sun screen and extend my departure time by a few hours. I'd better hurry and do it before before I retire, those steps over the hills sound like they are not wheel chair friendly. ;-)
Cam, Melbourne, Australia