On Saturday, T and I took the ferry up to Manly on the north shore of Sydney Harbour, with the vague idea of possibly doing a hike that’s in one of our guidebooks.  First we walked around Manly itself, which is just a little “village” of shops next to a beach that had a bunch of surfers in it but that I would never want to go swimming in because of all of the “beware of poisonous waste” signs everywhere.  It was weird.

Our guidebook was promising Aboriginal rock carvings and “abandoned 1930s sea shanties” over the course of the hike, so we decided just to start it and see how far we felt like going.  Of course, at the point where it still would have been worth it to turn back, we were this close to the sea shanties so we had to keep going, and etc. etc. we did the entire 10 kilometers.

It was a really cool walk.  It goes through this brushy national park, up a little mountain or hill to some views of the harbor, and back down again.  It’s also pretty vigorous, in case you’re considering it.  Lots of stairs.  We came out muddy and sore and I hurt the next day.  But some nice views from the top:

Those pics were all taken from different lookout stations along the walk.  It feels really deserted up there - we did run into a few other hikers but it didn’t feel at all like the “city” park that it technically is.  We heard a lot of birds, including this one called the whip bird that makes a sci-fi noise:

The sea shanties are at the bottom of the cliff in the second picture; unfortunately we couldn’t get right up on them and go in to look for ghosts, like I would have preferred.  Here’s a zoomed in (blurry) shanty:

By the time we came across the Indigenous rock carvings, it was getting kind of late, and we were racing against time because we wanted to be out of the park before it got dark.  The rock carvings are big outlines of different symbols like a kangaroo, boomerangs, and a fish, carved into the ground.  The parks service has set up log structures around them on the ground so you know where not to step.  (Still, they didn’t do a fantastic job of making that clear at the first symbol; we both stepped on it inadvertently trying to figure out where we were supposed to go!)  We didn’t know if it was cool to take pictures of the rock carvings, but we figured it would be ok to take a picture of the sign.

We also took a picture of the general area:

And we figured that the 1940s vandals wouldn’t mind if we took a picture of their own rock carving:

According to our guidebook, the local council took the initiative to re-groove the carvings a few years back.  Niiice.  It was a pretty cool thing to see, though, and I wish there had been more information about the meaning or purpose behind the rock carvings (I don’t know if you can make out the sign above, but you’re not missing much).

Anyway, it was getting dark, and we had to skip the optional turnoff to the lighthouse.  The last part of the map made it look like the end of the walk was along streets and beaches in a neighborhood, much like the beginning of the walk was.  We came out on a beach in a little neighborhood and looked for the way to the “Spit,” the bridge back to the city, which we could see in the near distance.

But the maps lied!  We had to follow the trail back into the woods, and continue going up and down stone stairs in the pitch dark.  Um, there’s nothing quite so nerve-wracking as being in a pitch-black forest park thing that’s in the middle of nowhere but also technically in a city, at night.  It seemed like exactly the kind of place for dumping bodies.

Eventually the trail spit us out onto the highway at the beginning of the bridge, with no indication of how to find the promised bus stop.  We used our woodsman instincts, honed from a long day in nature, to walk across the bridge and find a cab.

Filed in Out and about on Wednesday, July 1, 2009 ·