Bondi Beach is easily one of the most famous beaches in the world. Perennially popular among locals and tourists alike, the Sydney surf spot is always a hive of activity – and might just be one of the hardest places in the Southern Hemisphere to find a park, and that’s saying something, considering how much of a nightmare parking is in Sydney more broadly.
You really have three choices: park on the beach and feed half your life savings through the meter (that’s if you can even find a park there), park halfway back to the city, or try your luck in the rabbit warren of back streets for something close to the water. But you’re not even safe if you find a park, as one visitor recently discovered.
A now-viral TikTok shows how a tourist from Victoria and her Volkswagen Caddy van found herself parked in so aggressively by another car, a Mazda 2, that she could only just open the boot without scraping the Mazda’s bonnet. We’re talking millimetres here.
And we thought the French were shameless about parking people in… [Watch above]
While it’s not clear whether or not this is a disgruntled local just trying to park in front of their own house (fair enough, we reckon) or another day-tripper who’s taken an unnecessary chance (perhaps a more likely situation), whatever the case, it seems we’ll soon have to go ‘full Paris’ when parking in Bondi…
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Commenters were firmly on our heroine’s side, leaving choice remarks like “slam it” and “what jokers”. Even the TV-famous Bondi Lifeguards chimed in, simply commenting “yikes”. This one really sums up the prevailing sentiment:
“That bonnet has ‘key me’ written all over it. What sort of flop parks that close?”
It seems Bondi has become a bit of a mecca for sh*thouse drivers in recent years. It’s hard to forget the spectacularly bad parking job one Range Rover driver pulled off at South Bondi last summer, where the two-tonne SUV went through a guard rail and flipped down onto a pedestrian walkway. Parallel parking isn’t that hard, people.
Indeed, many of the worst offenders when it comes to parking around Australia’s most popular beaches seem to be Range Rover drivers. The high-end British cars have garnered a notorious reputation around Byron Bay over the last two years in particular – a visible sign of the cultural shift the seaside town has endured.
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Just don’t do what I did while parking at Bondi once: on a Saturday, I parked in a school carpark near the beach, thinking I’d come across a good thing. When I came back from my swim, I found the school gates had been closed and came to the uncomfortable realisation that I wouldn’t be able to get my car until Monday. How embarrassing…
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