Every so often, we like to play tourist in our home city. Let’s face it, Sydney is one of the BEST cities in the world and even we haven’t been everywhere or seen everything this beautiful harbour city has to offer.
To get a totally different perspective, we decided to do a bicycle tour with the guys from Bonza Bike Tours! This four-hour experience was a great way to explore Sydney, plus the guides at Bonza are super knowledgeable and shared heaps of interesting, fun facts along the way.
Whether you’re a local like us, entertaining friends and family visiting for the first time or if you’re a tourist looking for a fun way to check out the sights and sounds of Sydney, this is for you!
Before you go…
Before you head off to discover Sydney on two wheels, here are our top tips…
- Take a water bottle with you; if you do the same tour as we did it’s 4 hours so you’ll definitely need to top up the fluids, especially if it’s a sunny day.
- Take your camera (fully charged!), there are heaps of photo opportunities and your awesome guide will be happy to take photos of you. The bikes also have handy bags attached for your valuables so you don’t have to worry about carrying a backpack or anything.
- If it rains, your guide will have a poncho for you! How’s that for service!
- You might want to take some snacks with you, there is only one brief stop off where you can get food and there’ll only be time for a quick drink and bar snacks. If you get ‘hangry’ snacks are a must!
There aren’t too many hills on the tour so don’t worry if you’re not the most experienced cyclist. As long as you can ride without training wheels you should be all set!
We started our experience at Bonza HQ in The Rocks, one of the oldest parts of Sydney. Once kitted out with our bikes and helmets off we went, down to Circular Quay to get started on our ride around Sydney.
Steve, our guide, led the way as we headed off towards the Harbour Bridge, zipping past the Park Hyatt where the honeymoon suite will set you back a cool $16,000 per night! After a quick happy snap of the awesome view of the Sydney Opera House we continued on our way, cycling under the Harbour Bridge and around to the Finger Wharfs.
We learned that back in the day the Finger Wharfs housed both a huge rat colony and the poorest of the poor. Now the wharfs feature multimillion-dollar homes where the rich and famous live, such as A-list celebrities Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman.
Next we cycled up to Observatory Hill. You’ll be glad to know there were only a couple of very small hills on the tour…this was one of them! From the top of Observatory Hill you get a totally different view of Sydney. The Observatory itself is the oldest in the Southern Hemisphere!
Then it was a first for us…we got to cycle over the Sydney Harbour Bridge! This was awesome, the view from up there is amazing and you get a totally unique perspective of the city from up above. The trains and cars whizzing past up there too is pretty cool to see up close.
From there we stopped of at The Lord Nelson, one of the most historic pubs in the whole of Sydney. It’s also a brewery, famous for award winning ales, and a hotel. Steeped in history this place dates back to 1841, they also do a mean Harry’s pie!
After our pub pit stop, we headed off towards Darling Harbour and Chinatown, zooming past the tourists on foot we realised that getting around by bike is a really cool way to see Sydney. Next stop on the tour had us zipping over to Hyde Park, a quick ride through the city got us there and we stopped off for a brief history of the ANZACS before continuing on to The Domain.
This part of the ride was awesome, all down hill! Speeding through the park along the waters edge to Mrs. Macquaries Chair and another amazing view of Sydney Harbour. It’s worth noting that we learned heaps of interesting facts during this tour, like the fact that the first Matrix movie was filmed entirely in Sydney…would never have guessed that! Apparently it was a really big deal when it was happening here. And the pillars on the Sydney Harbour Bridge are only there for show, as the architect couldn’t get people to understand how the bridge would stay up without them, so he drew them on the schematics to shut them up!
The last part of the tour before heading back to The Rocks was through the Royal Botanic Gardens. We had to hop off our bikes for this bit as you’re not allowed to cycle in there but a leisurely stroll was pretty cool too. Last stop, the Sydney Opera House. The second most widely recognised building in the world after the Pyramids!
Having been a Sydneysider for the past six years, I never get sick of this city and in particular Sydney Harbour. There’s something really special about the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge…it just never gets old. If you have visitors or you simply want to play tourist for the day we’d highly recommend doing a bike tour with these guys. It was awesome fun and something a bit different to do!