The coastal walk
Bondi to Bronte is 2.5 kilometres of clifftop path and the best free thing to do here. Forty minutes at a walk, two hours if you stop. Go at first light.
9 minutes to the trailhead from the front door
Experiences
Six things worth doing, five of which are free.
We do not run tours and we do not take a commission for booking anything. This is the list we give people at the desk, written down.
Learning to surf
The north end is a forgiving beach break and there are three schools working it every morning. We keep the timetables at the desk and will book you in; we do not take a commission for it.
4 minutes from the front door
The ocean pools
North Bondi's rock pool is free, small and full of regulars by seven. Icebergs at the far end charges entry and is the one in the photographs. Both are seawater and both are cold until December.
6 and 14 minutes from the front door
Fish Market at dawn
The kitchen buys at Pyrmont three mornings a week and takes two guests along on Thursdays. It starts at 5:30am, which is the only difficult part of it.
20 minutes by car from the front door
Bondi Farmers Market
Sunday mornings in the grounds of the public school on Campbell Parade. Small, genuinely local, and finished by one o'clock.
8 minutes from the front door
The harbour, from the water
The 333 to the Quay and then any ferry. Manly is the one people take; Watsons Bay is twenty minutes and lands you at a swimming beach with no surf.
35 minutes to Circular Quay from the front door
Seasonal, and worth planning around
Whales pass the headland from June to October, north in winter and back south with calves in spring. Ben Buckler, five minutes uphill, is the free viewing platform everyone forgets about.
Sculpture by the Sea occupies the coastal walk for three weeks in late October and early November. It is worth seeing and it puts thirty thousand people on a clifftop path built for a few hundred, so go on a weekday at eight.
City to Surf runs on the second Sunday in August and finishes on the beach. Eighty thousand people arrive; the roads close from six. If you are not running it, that is a morning to be somewhere else, and if you are, you are already in the right postcode.
The journal has longer pieces on when to visit, the coastal walk, and where it is actually safe to swim.