Bondi or Manly? They Are Not the Same Beach.

Bondi and Manly are on the same harbour, in the same city, close enough that you can do both in a day. They are not the same beach and they are not interchangeable, and I went expecting them to be more alike than they are.

If you only have one day, that difference is the whole decision. So here it is.

Bondi is the beach you’re already picturing

Bondi looks the way you’d expect an Australian beach to look, if your expectations came from a postcard. Wide sand, big swells, tropical plants and fat succulents lining the coastal walk, sun doing exactly what Sydney sun is supposed to do in April.

The coastal walk is the reason to go, more than the sand is. Partway along, the path runs past a graveyard sitting right up on the hillside over the water — not eerie, just unexpectedly beautiful, headstones with an ocean view better than most hotels manage. Below it, natural rock pools cut into the shoreline, people climbing in and out all afternoon.

We didn’t get in. It was the tail end of Sydney’s summer and neither of us trusted the water temperature enough to find out the hard way. Worth knowing if you’re going in April: it looks like swimming weather and the water has a different opinion.

Manly is a different climate wearing a different coastline

This is the part that surprised us, and it’s the reason this post exists.

Where Bondi is succulents and California light, Manly has a long boardwalk backed by a wall of pine trees and air that’s noticeably colder. We stood there trying to place it against somewhere we’d actually been and couldn’t land on anywhere in the States — closest guess was Northern California, maybe Oregon or Washington. Honestly it felt more like what we were expecting from New Zealand, which we hadn’t even reached yet on that trip, than anywhere in Australia.

Same harbour. Completely different place.

Manly also has Shelly Beach a short walk around the headland, which is where the shore divers go in, and Phelan’s Brewing, which got a real no-qualifiers favourite-spot ranking from both of us.

So which one should you actually do?

If you have one day and you want the Australia in your head, go to Bondi and walk the coastal path. That’s the correct answer for most people and I’m not going to be contrarian about it.

If you have two days, or you’ve already seen Bondi, take the ferry. Manly is the one we still talk about, and the ferry ride is not a commute — it’s the best cheap thing we did in Sydney.

And if you’re deciding between them on the morning of, let the weather pick. Bondi wants sun and pays it back. Manly is better in the grey, because the grey is what it’s for.

One more thing, which is really about vacations generally

We had a scuba dive booked at Manly — the kind of thing that sounds great three weeks out and much less great the actual morning of, when it’s cold and windy and your gear is sitting there daring you to change your mind.

We changed our mind. We walked down to Shelly Beach and watched a group of divers go in off the shore without us.

I’d do that again. If it doesn’t feel right, it isn’t worth the stress, and a booked activity is not a debt you owe. Twenty minutes watching somebody else be cold is a perfectly good use of a holiday morning.

The postcards have Bondi’s version of Sydney on them. They don’t really have room for the version a ferry ride away that looks like somewhere else entirely — but that’s the version we keep telling people about.

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