I was kindly invited by Carlos Lousada to go to the volunteers meal at Relva and yet again, I was amazed at what can happen in a small community of 3000 people when it comes to helping each other.
At the beginning of the evening we were invited to have snacks and a drink, which was welcome after watching the Champions League final in a local bar. The snacks were a meal in themselves, with pastries, mixtures to put on local bread and a rather delicious prawn spread that had me returning to the snack table too many times!
We made a home here almost a year ago now. We made a home here because it’s in the middle of The Atlantic, it has green fields like Yorkshire has green fields, yet it doesn’t get much colder than 14 degrees in the winter, it has gorgeous soil that can grow most things except pineapples, so here they grow pineapples in glasshouses and bananas in the fields, or avocados, strange flowers that look like they’ve landed from another planet, but mostly grass for cows that we woo into making cheese. Lots of cheese.
Around the turn of the last century people built many seaside pools around Sydney, so I decided to visit a few and am now standing above the Wally Weekes pool which is at the north end of Bondi Beach.
The surf life saving club say that wally Weekes was one of their founding members, By account he also founded the Bondi life saving club, was a swimmer, boxer, publican and a life saver, quite a character who was important enough to name this pool after.
Iceberg
At the other end of the beach is a swimming club that dates back to 1929, when a local band of life savers trying to maintain their fitness in Winter formed the Bondi Icebergs Winter Swimming Club.
There is a membership rule called the “15B rule” that states that you must swim three out of four winter Sundays for five years.
The water temperature hovers around 16 degrees during winter.
Bronte baths
Bronte Baths was ppened back in 1887 so it’s one of Sydney’s oldest pools. It is best known for it’s regular swimmer Evelyn Whillier, who at 18 competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and at 20 won gold in the 1938 British Empire Games. In the 1990s — in her late 70s — she’d head to Bronte at 5am every day to squeeze in a few kilometres. You’ll meet all kinds of swimmers here — from similarly serious lappers to kids in floaties. There’s ample room on the surrounding rocks for lazing about. Consider a night swim on balmy evenings.
Walkway around past Waverly Cemetery, Clovelly Ocean Pool, Giles Baths
From Bronte baths there’s a wonderful walkway that takes us past waverly cemetery, then around Clovelly Beach and Clovelly Ocean Pool which wasn’t too clean when I walked past it, but at the end of the bay there are some wonderful places to swim in the rough sea.
Then we get to the Giles Baths at Dolphin’s Point before walking around to my favourite ocean pool in Sydney, which is Wylie’s Baths….
Wylie’s Baths
Wylie’s baths were built in 1907 by the father of Mina Wylie, who was one of Australia’s first female Olympic swimming representatives. In fact Mina Wylie and Fanny Durack were Australia’s first woman gold and silver medallists.
Putting history aside the thing I love about Wylie’s baths is the relaxed nature of the place. Like the Icebergs Pool it has facilities including a space for Yoga and Pilates as well as a great little cafe, but the best thing for me is the feeling of community that this place has.
Because the swimming section is a converted rockpool it also has many other inhabitants too, fish, nudibranch of you see them as well different species of octopus, including the little blue ring octopus that you must make sure you don’t touch if you are lucky to see it.
All in all I would say that the beach pools make sydney worth seeing alone.
I’m on a stop-over in Thailand to get my teeth fixed and take a peek at Laos as I had never been there before. In Australia it was a hundred quid to simply get a filling, in Thailand you can buy a small village for the same cash so here I am typing this, teeth fixed, in Bangkok waiting for the train to go to Vientiane in Laos.
I found a lovely bunch of people running a paragliding hostel a short half an hours walk from town. The welcome was wonderful at the house of Martin and Mariella, there were a few other paragliding folks and Martins’s brother Diego. We all got on well, talked of flying and the freedom it brings, we didn’t even begin to suspect what would happen the next day.
