Harbour walks: Milsons Point to Woolwich - Leg 1

I don’t think my skin has been this brown since primary school, when we were made to go to swimming classes each morning in the summer. Being from Scotland, it was Ben’s parents’ prerogative to spend as much time soaking up vitamin D as possible while they were here. But it made me tired. Embarrassingly so. But thank goodness for them, otherwise this harbour thing was going to get away from me, I think. 30 km in 2 days – 14.5 in the first, and 15.5 in the second – was far more than I would ever have done on my own. High fives for playing tourist in your own town.

The first trick was to get a multi-trip pass that allowed us to get on and off all trains, buses and ferries for a week. The walks were organised as such that we would be trekking between ferry terminals, a short distance by water, considerably longer by foot as the shoreline meandered in tentacle-like shapes away from the middle of the harbour. Day 1 started from Luna Park, went around Lavender Bay and McMahons Point, Berrys Bay and Balls Head, Berry Island and Gore Cove to finish at Greenwich Point.

The boarded walk from Luna Park to Lavender Bay is rather nice – gardens hiding funny little sculptures, including Blinky Bill and Nutsy who along with Enid Blyton were pretty much solely responsible for my childhood devouring of books. Wendy Whiteley’s garden is also worth a visit. Views of the harbour from the top of the stairs were exquisite, although views of thousands of spiders perching atop gnarly webs, not so much. From McMahons Point, we followed the water around to Blues Point. Did you know that this is the only part of the whole city where you can stand directly opposite from the centre of the Harbour Bridge? Me neither.



After a while, I must admit I started to get Bridge fatigue. It’s hard to get sick of the sight of it normally, but taking new photos at every slight variation in height from sea level and angle from shore slowly became more tiresome. Except it is such a lovely dang bridge. You want to get the shot. But you also remember you’ve got 12 more kms to go before you can go to the pub. It’s a mental wrestling point.

The path winds through grassy parklands, an old timber yard, and a disused industrial site which used to be the BP Oil Terminal. It’s landscaped now, with the bare sandstone walls left where they were once curved to fit around the shapes of oil tanks. The steel walkways above the site allow for more elevated sightseeing and lead down to Balls Head Reserve, where we took the scenic route along the bottom of the cliffs for a while.

Our route right around was blocked due to a closed path, but the reserve isn’t very big anyway. We retraced our steps and met up with it on the other side before heading back up towards Waverton. The Pasks recommend The Coffee Shop Pats on Bay Road for lunch. The French toast was alright for $5.50 and the croissants are huge.

A couple of coves later and we took the low tide route along to Berry Island. It's almost tropical in there, lush and cool and beautiful along Ballasters Track. This turned into the Gore Cove track and finally down towards Greenwich Point where we could catch the ferry back to Circular Quay. Ben had a dip in the Greenwich Baths while we were waiting; I sat on the shore and meditated to the sound of shells being lapped onto the sand. Then it rained.

And that was Day One.