One of the best views on the Bondi Coastal Walk isn’t one you’ve seen
Photo by me - blurred intentionally so you get to see it for yourself when you visit
I've done the Bondi to Clovelly walk more times than I’ve had hot dinners. Coogee too, on the days I'm feeling energetic. It's become such a fixture of my week that I had stopped noticing it — podcast playing, autopilot on, eyes half-closed, getting the steps in amongst some of the world’s best scenery.
Which is probably why it took me this long to find what's behind those playing fields at Clovelly.
If you’re anything like me, you probably finish the Clovelly leg, glance across at the Surf Club, maybe take a hit from the bubbler and either turn back toward the world’s best located Bowling Club or push on toward Coogee - if you’re game. Fair enough — that's the walk.
But cut in alongside the playing fields, past the outdoor gym, and there's a flat rocky expanse out there that most of us walkers never touch. No signage pointing you to it, no crowd. Just sandstone shelf, ocean on all sides, and — this is cool I think — a clean sightline back along the curving coastline toward Bondi.
You don't get that angle anywhere else on the walk. Every other vantage point along the cliffs faces out to sea or across to the next headland. This one looks back at where you started, the whole coastline laid out behind you. And a feeling of how far you’ve come (or if you’re a glass half empty kinda person, how far you have to walk back lol). It's a small thing, but it changed how I think about this walk - one I thought I knew better than the back of my hand.
There's a broader point in there somewhere, and it's one I come back to often in this job: proximity to something doesn't mean familiarity with it. You can walk past a place a hundred times and still miss what makes it work. Same goes for suburbs, streets, even individual properties — the value isn't always where the foot traffic goes. Sometimes it's fifty metres off the main path, unnoticed, because nobody's had a reason to look.
If you're local and haven't found this spot, it's worth the detour. And if you're not local — well, this is a decent example of why, despite its population and its proximity to a global city, the Eastern Suburbs still has some relatively undiscovered pockets, that are truly connected to nature.
Mark
