Sydney: Coogee Women’s Baths and the Bondi to Coogee Coastal Walk

It’s been three months since I stepped off the train in Sydney, greeted by a friend I had met in Ecuador last year who was kind enough to take me in and show me around her hometown for my first weekend in the city. Since then, I’ve eased into a normal kind of life again and haven’t really felt very inspired to write. But, with only eight days before I toss my bags on a bus and begin my journey up the east coast of Australia, I think it is finally time to update you all with what life has been like for the first few months of this year!

After an amazing first weekend of my friend fully adopting me into her Sydney girl gang: a fun and diverse mix of women, some from Australia and others, like myself, stragglers from other parts of the world, I moved in to au pair for another family based in Coogee.

Coogee is a small little seaside suburb with the majority of it’s goings-ons immersed within just a few streets. People walk through the supermarkets barefoot and around town in very little clothing. Musicians strum on their guitars in Little Jack Horner cafe, the Pavillion throws parties that look out over the sea and families come fully prepared to barbecue on the lawns. There’s no wonder that I felt very at home, very quickly as I started to explore.

And by explore I mean walk ten minutes from my bed to the beach to spend any free time I had swimming and basking in the sunshine.

Or hitting up the Pav for their weekday pizza and beer deals. Or Salt cafe for their chai lattes. Or Coco Bliss for their smoothie bowls. Basically I spent a lot of time beaching, eating and drinking.

I was, thankfully, introduced to the most magical place in Coogee really early on: the McIver Women’s Baths. For $2 entry you can spend the day at these women only baths, a place where women of all backgrounds can come, relax (often topless), sunbathe on the rocks and swim in the rock pool. It’s a secluded little oasis up the hill from the main beach and free from creepy eyes.

But Coogee isn’t the only nice suburb by the sea – you can do the Bondi to Coogee Coastal Walk, a 6km urban walk from one popular beach to the next. The walk is meant to be around two hours but I would recommend spending an entire afternoon on it. There are so many beautiful photo opportunities and I don’t know about you but I couldn’t resist jumping into the water along the way.

Follow the paved walkway starting at the bottom of Notts Avenue, near the Bondi Icebergs pool, to begin your walk.

From there, the walk took us along Sydney’s beautiful Eastern coastline, up and down stairs and to Tamarama rocks – a little rocky spot with shallow rock pools to wade in. Did I mention that there’s rocks?

From Tamarama Rocks you can continue along the coast to Tamarama Beach, Bronte Beach and Clovelly Beach, where we felt it was time for another dip in the water. Clovelly is an interesting beach that lots of people seem to love but it really isn’t one of my favorites. It feels a lot less natural than other beaches and bays along the coast – it’s more like an ocean pool, with two concrete platforms having been built on either side of the water with steps leading down into the water.

And maybe that makes sense – Aussies seems to love their pools, with nearly every beach along the coast having an ocean pool. After a good long swim and a suntan at Clovelly, we went off to Gordon’s Bay.

After meeting a few more friends in Gordon’s Bay, we found a spot upon the rocks to place ourselves before diving into the water. Despite it’s beautiful turquoise water, this is where I ended up getting stung by a blue bottle jellyfish. I mean, coming to a country where the majority of things can probably kill you, I guess it was about time I encountered something.

Graceful as always, I let out a shaky scream because my instant thought was that my arm had obviously just grazed a full grown shark. That was clearly only logical, am I right? So after for a moment feeling like my life was very nearly at the end, I was pretty relieved when I realize I’d just been stung by a jelly.

If you also happen to get stung by a blue bottle, you’re meant to rinse off, pull off any tentacles that may be attached to your skin and then shower in the hottest water you can stand. And that’s about it I guess, but it hurts. Seeing as I was at Gordon’s Bay with no showers around, I dumped what was left in my water bottle (which was quite warm from being in the sun for five hours at that point), and called it a day. By the time I got home, my arm was covered in puffy red bumps and a rash in a squiggly, tentacle-shaped(?) line.

All in all, it was a beautiful and eventful day that took us around five hours to make our way from Bondi to Coogee, where we finished off with some Mexican food for dinner.

If you end up doing the walk, you can add an extra half an hour onto your day and walk to Maroubra, another beach suburb just south of Coogee.