The vista below is of the famous Bells Beach, where they hold the Rip Curl pro every year. It's the beach everyone flocks to watch the winter swells come in, and I grew up only a kilometre away from it, hearing the waves crash from my bedroom at night. It's where our walk starts, along the cliff to Point Addis and the Ironbark Basin, a walk that goes through beautiful bushland with views of one of my favourite beaches on this coast.

Of course one has to be aware of unstable cliffs as one walks this way, and in the great Australian tradition of over signing, they had to illustrate it for us. Saying that, people do fall off these cliffs and of late, landslips have killed people, so perhaps it's justified.

In the 90's we'd ride our horses through the cliff tracks and bushland, but they'd never allow it now. Some of the drops are quite threatening, and the nature is quite sensitive to hoof prints, so that is fair enough. The clay is thick and sticks to your boots - my friends are barefoot walkers, even in the middle of winter, so it stuck to their feet.

The views take my breath away - it doesn't matter how many hundreds of times I see this view, I feel awed every time. I surf a lot in this bay, and there were lots of people in the water on this day since it was a Saturday, but the swell is lopsided and the tide wrong so not many people are catching waves, aside from a few good surfers out on the point.

With the zoom on my phone I captured the surf a little better, and you can see the wind that would make it hard to be on the face. But from a distance, and to the expert eye, it looks beautiful.

Like on many parts of this coastline, you can find indigneous middens, places where you'd find shells and other evidence of people collecting food - basically a rubbish tip! Sadly that's all that's left now, that and some signs.

As you international bloggers love to hear about snakes in Australia, the patch below is apparently full of tiger snakes. Years ago they put a sign there saying as much, but we think they put it there to stop us going up the other side and through the bush. Funnily enough the sign isn't there anymore - instead, a fence. It's where we used to ride the horses, bush bashing through the scrub. No longer, of course - it's important to preserve what we have and the population being what it is, you can't have people charging up the place with bikes and horses anymore.

Doesn't stop us remembering, of course. We also used to thunder the horses along the beach at low tide, going down the ramp at Southside, on the other side of Bells headland. We'd skinny dip them in the ocean, ride naked bareback. It boggles me that we did that then - crazy, huh? There's so many people around now that you just can't do such things. Back then we'd never see a soul. My Dad and his mates used to drive his old Holden on that beach - you'd be booked for it now.

I'd forgotton how lovely it was to walk through those cliff and shrub tracks. These days the houses bordering that land are worth a fortune - but it's still our playground, even though it's fenced and signed in a way it wasn't in the past.

By the end of the walk we were starving - falafel gyros were a welcome lunch in Torquay, and a hot latte. Cold weather and long walks make for hungry beasts, that's for sure.

With Love,

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