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The world, Australia, New South Wales, metropolitan Sydney, the Bayside Local Government Area (LGA). With COVID-19 my horizons have been shrinking. With ‘the worst yet to come’ regarding hospitalisations, my cycling playground is now the Bayside LGA where I live. There is lot there, and today I checked out the perimeter and the innards and saw beach, marsh, ships and planes.

The Bayside LGA has the airport at its heart and Port Botany with all its ships and cargo containers on the eastern flank. With the ultra-dangerous airport freeway tunnel on the south side of the airport the only way to pass on the south, my trip today was divided neatly into two halves – the eastern Port Botany side and the southern Botany Bay side.

Here is a link to the strava map.

The East Flank

The foreshore at Port Botany is marshy with short stretches of beach.

The innards of this arm is suburbia

and industry.

The South Flank

There he stood on the grassy hidden path his eye all red and puffy. “Can I have some of your water to flush out my eye?”

He had a seed in his eye. My thoughts were COVID danger, but I should help him. I gave him my water bottle and stood back as he flushed out his eye, once and then again a few minutes later with a second attempt to get rid of the seed.

This was a part of my LGA that I wanted to discover for some time. I had seen what looked like a bridge crossing the swamp through the bushes behind a locked gate. There are other ways to get to this place – little tracks branching off into the bushes that pass under the freeway and through the soggy wetland.

Then there was the sandy beach looking out over the airport runway. I was the planes land and take off. Maybe I saw the 500,000 Pfizer vaccines arrive from Singapore. They were meant to have arrived today.

A tongue of sand reaching out into the bay at Sandringham reminded me a bit of Vlieland in the Netherlands with its endless plateau of sand. Admittedly this tongue of sand is a bit smaller, but it was beautiful all the same – and just 20 minutes cycle from home.

Inland, parallel to the beach is a thin strip of grassy parkland following a little creek. Evening cycles along there make me feel like I have escaped the bustle – even if only for 20 minutes.

There is a lot of see in Bayside LGA. This will be my playground for quite some time to come.