AvantBlog

Last week, Margie and I did the Spit to Manly walk. It’s got a rather unfortunate sounding name, I know. It’s called the Spit to Manly walk, or the Manly to Spit walk, depending on which place you start and end from because, well, the endpoints are the Spit Bridge, in Mosman, and Manly, one of the popular Northern beachy suburbs. Either way you walk it, you’re in for at least a four hour stroll and, since we started the walk at the Spit Junction, at the top of the hill that the Spit Bridge connects to, we ended up with a slightly longer walk, around 12km in total.

Two of my coworkers told me that the walk is one of the best that Sydney has to offer and, even having not done a lot of the walks yet, I’m sure they’re right. This walk has it all: postcard-worthy harbor views, tiny hidden beaches, countless birds, trees, and plants, aboriginal rock carvings, electric barbecues for public use, an EXELOO (more on that below), and even a lighthouse!

Since the walk follows the coastline all the way from the Spit Bridge to Manly, almost every turn you make greets you with a new view of the water. Of course, this also means that the path follows rising and falling terrain, like the rest of Sydney, so parts of it were a real workout on the legs.

So, aside from all the really amazingly beautiful nature, I’d say that the things I remember most about the walk are the animals, the EXELOO, and the rock carvings.

First: the animals. The walk takes you through a surprising variety of vegetation zones, from towering eucalyptus trees, to big poofy ferns, to groves of pine trees and, as the scenery changes, so do the bird calls. In one area, we heard a high-pitched ring-a-ding song that tracked down to a gorgeous Crimson Rosella sitting on a branch calling to a friend.

But the best bird call was one from a bird that we never ended up seeing, but we sure heard it a lot, and we turned it’s call into a game. You see, the Eastern Whipbird makes a call that I think sounds like a laser gun; warming up with a ‘Whoooooop’ and then firing a fast ‘PEW PEW!’ So, I suggested that every time we heard one of these laser guns warm up, we had to squat down before it fired the PEW PEW, or we’d get hit in the head with the laser beam. I think we might have been hit once or twice (the time it takes for some of these birds to fire their guns is faster than others), and we definitely got a great thigh workout from all the rapid squatting.

The other bit of fauna from our walk that warrants some mention is the snake that Margie saw. I must have stepped right over it because I didn’t see it in front of me, but I was walking in front of Margie and I heard her call out behind me. To quote it exactly, I believe her words were “Oh! Snake. Snake! THAT’S A SNAKE!” I turned around to see the tail end of it slither into some bushes at the side of the path. Margie says that it looked to her like a dark curvy stick on the path suddenly came to live and slithered very quickly off the footpath. All we can tell is that it was dark brown all over. It was probably venomous, because most snakes in Australia are, and it could very well have been an Eastern Brown Snake, one of the world’s deadliest snakes, being “the second most toxic land snake in the world, after the Inland Taipan (which may also be found in Australia),” according to Wikipedia. Well, no matter what it was. The snake quickly vanished into the bush and we continued on with our walk, with 100% more glances down to the ground for the next half hour.

So, you might think that taking this Spit to Manly walk isn’t such a good idea after all because, you know, you might get bitten by a snake and die. But if you don’t do this walk, sure, you might live longer, but you might very well spend your whole live without taking a piss in an EXELOO. And that, my friends, is a life half-pissed.

The EXELOO is a really remarkable piece of civic sanitation. It’s a public toilet, or, as the EXELOO website suggests, a “self managing public toilet module,” which might actually be a more appropriate description since it makes this thing sound rather robotic, which it is. You might think it’s funny that I want to mention a public toilet in this writeup of one of Sydney’s best nature walks, but I’m telling you, this thing is not to be missed.

Near one of the cute little beaches that the Spit to Manly walk takes you through, we saw a little pavilion with two changing rooms and a toilet, I mean, err, a self managing public toilet module. It said EXELOO on the outside and had an icon indicating that it was vacant. I didn’t have any pressing need to use it, but I had been keeping my eye out for a toilet for Margie because I knew she had been in the market for a clean public toilet for the last ten minutes or so. This EXELOO sure seemed to fit the bill. With it’s brushed steel exterior, it sure exuded an air of cleanliness. I called her over and Margie happily decided to try it out.

She pushed the ‘Open Door’ button and the door slid open with a “swoosh.” But the door didn’t make the swoosh sound; a speaker did. It sounded like the sound the doors on the Enterprise make when they slide open and closed. This toilet had sound effects! It didn’t stop there, though. After Margie went inside, the door fake-swooshed closed behind her, and, in a polite but sort of robotic sounding voice, the toilet boomed “WELCOME TO THE EXELOO. THE DOOR IS NOW LOCKED. YOU HAVE TEN MINUTES REMAINING.” And then it started playing “What the World Needs Now Is Love” for her. Music! While you pee! Australia for the win.

I don’t really know how I can possibly transition from the EXELOO to the aboriginal rock carvings near Grotto Point, so let’s try an imagination exercise.

Imagine a time before we had things like EXELOOs. Well, actually, I need you to go back and imagine MUCH farther back in time. Say, I don’t know, because nobody knows for sure, but let’s say maybe 40,000 years ago. Imagine that long ago, if you can, because that’s probably how old these aboriginal rock carvings at Grotto Point are.

Yep. I think these pieces of early human art qualify as Pretty Fucking Old. And yet, there they are, on the Spit to Manly walk, extremely well preserved. Etched deep into a large flat area of rock, the outlines of a kangaroo, some fish, and a few boomerangs gave me a very powerful reminder that there were plenty of indigenous people hanging out and living quite happily for thousands and thousands of years.

And, well, that pretty well sums up something I’m really enjoying about Sydney: that you can go on a gorgeous nature walk, one Sunday morning, and take in beautiful water views, see birds flying around that you’d only see in pet stores in America, stumble upon toilets that play music for you, and see rock carvings that are some of the oldest examples of human art on the planet. Yeah, this city is pretty cool.

More Photos From The Walk

http://www.flickr.com/photos/avantbard/sets/72157621983789216/

The Path We Took

View Spit to Manly Walk in a larger map

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 16th, 2009 at 6:17 am and is filed under Australia, Sydney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.