When we arrived at the Bondi Beach house Backpackers YHA – Hostel, we realized we were staying closer to Tamarama Beach. While it was still a pretty nice beach, it wasn’t as close to the party central, Bondi Beach, that we were expecting. The hostel was located in a residential area with limited parking and even if we were up for walking, it wasn’t going to be a quick walk to the bars and restaurants that were near the famous surf beach, because ther ewere some pretty steep hills that we didn’t care to climb.
Once we found a parking space, we walked through the sliding glass door and waited in line at the front desk. As usual, the person behind the desk was a laid back, hippie type of guy with his hair styled like he had just rolled out of his bunk bed down the hall. He was helping someone that was having trouble with their room request and after he helped her out, he waved us forward. We handed over our passports to check-in and he gave us our keys. We walked down the hall lined with travel activity brochures, took a right, and continued until we reached our room on the left side of the hall.
As far as hostels go, this one didn’t seem like anything different compared to some of the other places that we have stayed. We used the magnetic key to unlock the door and then proceeded into our room. Straight ahead was a window that looked out to the ocean in the distance, with neighborhood houses in the foreground. There was a bunch bed to the left with a full sized mattress on the bottom and a twin mattress on the top. We plugged in our electronic devices into the outlets by the door and then got changed into some nicer clothes to head over to get some dinner.
I was a little reluctant to drive as opposed to taking an Uber, so that we didn’t lose our parking space, but Elizabeth insisted that we rented a car to drive it and that we should just drive over. It was about a 5 minute drive, which actually seemed pretty walkable, but we found a parking space almost right away. While the weather in the morning seemed warm and sunny, the afternoon had brought in a marine layer and wind that didn’t make the beach as desirable, at least not for swimming. Looking out at the ocean, there didn’t seem to be anyone surfing, so maybe in addition to less than desirable air temperature, the surfing conditions weren’t idea either.
As we began walking down Campbell Parade, the street running parallel with the beach, we continued passed little places to eat, souvenir shops, and surf shops. We walked down an alley where we saw a few places to eat and ended up sitting on the patio of an Italian place named Pompeii. They had a pretty wide selection of Italian cuisine, but we ended up deciding on a margarita pizza. We guessed that it was possible that the restaurant was authentic, because even our waiter had an Italian accent. We mused that the whole staff had left the motherland to start a restaurant in Australia close to the beach.
It’s really hard to mess up pizza, but this pizza was exceptional and it really hit the spot after our long morning hike and long drive back from the central coast. After we finished our food and wine, and paid the bill we headed back to the main street, where we stopped off for some frozen yoghurt. This meal was really making our favorite foods seem universal, so even if we are on the other side of the world, we can still feel at home. We walked across the street to the beach sidewalk and sat down at a picnic table to eat our yoghurt, while we looked out at the waves.
Bondi Beach was a cove in a way and we reminisced about how similar the area resembled Avalon on Catalina Island off the coast of California. There was a small beach with houses built along each side on top of cliffs and shops and restaurants facing the water. After we finished our fro-yo, we walked over to a bar with a patio named, Lush on Bondi. I grabbed a pint of Australia beer, while Elizabeth got a glass of wine, then we continued out to the patio, where we sat and chilled for a little while. I thought it would be fun to hang out and get drinks in the area later, but Elizabeth thought that it would be fun to go to a movie instead. After we finished our drinks we walked down the sidewalk in front of the pavilion, and came across a bar called the Bucket List. While our bar was chill and laid back, the Bucketlist had a crowd of 20-somethings hanging out on the patio, and a dj playing music.
As we made our way around the building Elizabeth realized that she had left her bag at the bar. She ran around the building in a frenzy, while I walked at a brief pace as I was still recovering from my race two days before. Luckily, her bag was still at the table and she didn’t lose her passport and other valuables. We walked back to the car and started looking up a cinema nearby. I looked up one on my phone and Elizabeth looked up one on hers and while I thought that we both had directions to the same one because they both said that the arrival time was 15 minutes, hers was right around the corner and strangely, I had directions to a completely different cinema across town. I had remembered seeing a Westfield shopping center with a cinema off the highway on the way in, which I thought was the same Westfield shopping center with the Sydney Tower. Usually we go to the top of these when we go to a city that has one, so I thought that we could kill two birds with one stone.
As we started driving into the city, I really started to doubt that we were heading to the right place. Elizabeth was getting irritable and I was getting frustrated, because as we got closer to the address, traffic was becoming incredibly slow. There were people everywhere and it felt like we spent 20-30 minutes in the same block. We finally saw a sign for the underground parking lot for the Westfield Shopping Center. When we made it to the attendant, he told us that it would be $30 to park there. We thought that it was a little steep and asked if we could get it validated at the movie theater. “There isn’t a movie theater in this mall,” He said. “Are you sure?” We questioned. “I think you mean the Bondi Westfield. Not every Westfield has a movie theater.” Damn. Elizabeth’s GPS was correct and mine was not correct. We DID want to go to the one around the corner and we had just spent almost 90 minutes in the car, and we weren’t even going to make it into a movie.
We looked to see that there was another movie theater in Chinatown only a few blocks away. We put it into the GPS and started looking for parking spaces or at least an underground lot, but we weren’t finding any. The more we looked the more that we had to go to the bathroom, so we just randomly stopped in a loading zone in the front of a Chinese restaurant. Elizabeth ran in, as I watched taxi and Uber drivers pick up and drop off passengers until she came back to the car.
She told me to go through the alley and turn right. When I did, I found myself in what felt like a completely different country, ironically it was called World Square. There were lights and decorations that didn’t seem seasonal and what appeared to be a giant dragon in the courtyard, not to mention that it appeared that everyone was Chinese or of Chinese decent. Eventually, I found the restroom and I made my way back to the car. We drove a few blocks over, then saw someone pulling out of a space. I walked over to the parking meter and got a ticket to put in the window, then we walked a block over to the movie theater.
We had spend more than an hour driving around and looking for parking, so the showtimes available were going to be limited, but we looking to the ticket machine to see what was being offered. There was a sign up across the hallway from the machines advertising a Japanese film festival and as we looked through the movie times, we found that 3 of the 5 movies that we had to choose from were part of that festival. The other two movies were Joker and Charlie’s Angels. Joker had started 20 minutes prior and Charlie’s Angels was just starting. Elizabeth wasn’t really sure what she wanted to see, but the anticipation had left her wanting me to just buy some tickets, so that we could “see a movie or something” which we hadn’t done in a while.
When I went to purchase the movie tickets they were $40 AUD each, which seemed extreme given the options. Elizabeth asked me what I thought and I told her that I didn’t think that it was worth $80 to see a movie that had already started or a movie that I wasn’t event really interested in seeing in the first place. Granted, when converted to USD it is only about $54, but it still seems like our money could be better spent.
Feeling defeated we walked around looking into a few store fronts before just walking back to the car and driving back to Bondi Beach. It was sort of a worthless and uneventful journey through Sydney that barely warranted a story. On the way back, however, we stopped at a liquor store that was going to close at any minute. I picked out a few single cans of Australian craft beer and took them up to the register. I put my card in the credit card machine only to find out that my card had been declined, because certain card machines in Australia won’t accept cards that have to be signed for. Luckily, I had a few Australian dollar coins on me and I was able to buy the beer, but it still seemed like an unnecessary in convenience.
We got back to the hostel and went down to our room. After all the driving around Elizabeth decided that she didn’t feel much like going out anymore, and so we just laid on the bottom bunk and tried to log into the wifi, so that we could watch a movie. When we tried to log on, we found out that we had to get a code from the front desk to log on. I went to the front desk and paid the $10 for wifi and got a little sheet of paper with the log in code on it. As I read the sheet of paper to log into the computer, it said, one code per device per night. Ridiculous. We ended up watching a part of a movie before just crashing out in the middle.
If you have ever stayed in a hostel, you know that even though there are “quiet hours” people are up all hours making all sorts of noise. Young people that are bunked up with their friends are partying and coming home at 3am and you are bound to me woken up at least a few times, even if you are in a private room. The cost to stay there was $99 AUD per night were was $67 USD, which seems like a pretty good rate. But one thing that really soured me besides the lack of free wifi was that the bathroom were disgusting. I get that in a shared bathroom situation with a bunch of young people there is going to be some slobs, but these bathrooms looked like they hadn’t been cleaned in days.
Considering the fact that we didn’t really have a chance to embrace the romanticized Bondi Beach experience, we probably could’ve stayed anywhere else in Sydney and probably would’ve had just as good of a time.
The next morning, we woke up and actually walked down to the Tamarama Beach. It was a much more beautiful day. It was sunny with blue skies and it would’ve been so much more awesome of a beach day, if we were going to be around. Instead we drove to the airport, stopping for gas, and heading to the Gold Coast.