Manly & Narrabeen

Manly & Narrabeen

Manly is a beautiful little suburb of Sydney, facing directly east into the Pacific Ocean. It's full of surf shops and boasts an enormous beach with a large tree lined, grassy esplanade. It also has an outstanding headland (North Head) which boasts phenomenal views over Sydney Harbour, and is home to the Q Station, an old quarantine station where the ships used to dock if they had suffered an outbreak of disease. This is now a museum which describes what life was like if you were quarantined there during an outbreak of Spanish Flu/Smallpox/Bubonic Plague etc.

 Manly Harbour

 Surfing at Manly beach

 Manly had exceptionally aggressive locals - leading to incidences like this!

 Views over Sydney Harbour/Botany Bay from North Head

 Autoclaves for disinfecting luggage at the Q Station. Below: Charlotte at the Q Station dock. This was also temporarily home to the SS Lusitania - famous for being the passenger ship that was sunk by German U-Boats in WW1. There is even graffiti on the cliffs from the passengers of it, and multiple other ships.

The next day, we headed up to another world class surf beach in Sydney's Northern Beaches. This is Narrabeen - a blazing fast left-hand point break that is name-checked in the Beach Boy's song "Surfing USA"