Australia is well-known to have one of the world's best surfing destinations. Its 37,000km coastline is blessed with beach, reef and point break to challenge the most experienced board-riders. There are also numerous easy-rolling swells for beginners to paddle on safely and confidently.
Margaret River - Yallingup and Prevelly Park, Western Australia
This is not a place for beginners or the faint-hearted. "Surfers Point" at Prevelly even attracts the popular surfers from the US and Hawaii. It's one of the few places in Australia where board-riders wear helmets and nobody laughs at them.
Crescent Head, New South Wales
There are four perfect right-hand pointbreaks, tailor-made for long-board riders, eyelets and novices and skillful of generating miracle rides of 200 meters. Some of the sports best have been filmed here "Hanging Ten" or cross-stepping the length of their 10-foot boards. A wedge-shaped rock formation is known as Delicate Nobby, that starts just off the beach and spears out into the Pacific, creating beach breaks on either side can also be found here.
Torquay - Bells Beach, Victoria
This is the home of Australian surfing both historically and spiritually. It is still the site of the country's oldest and most prestigious professional surfing event which is now named as the Rip Curl Pro. Waves from the Southern Ocean slow down and gets steep over the narrow reefs to produce exceptional surf. When it reached for almost five meters, most of us are best advised to think of surfing Bells as a spectator sport.
Northern Beaches, New South Wales
Sydney's northern peninsula offers a series of surf beaches incomparable by a city environment anywhere else on earth. Manly itself has frisky beach halts and punchy barrels, plus the offshore Queenscliff, joy for big wave riders. Freshwater Beach is popular with bodysurfers and youngsters on bodyboards.
The 6km coastal strip between Dee Why Beach and North Narrabeen is generally considered Sydney's blue-ribbon surfing belt, with the legendary Long Reef situated smack in the middle. The distinctive burnt-orange sands of Palm Beach mark the end of the peninsula, its 1.5km procession of beach breaks offering thrills and stumbles for surfers, body-boarders, and wave-ski paddlers.
Seal Rocks and Pacific Palms, New South Wales
Lighthouse Beach and Treachery Beach at Seal Rocks are known for generating epic waves when south swell rolls in. The Pacific Palms, Boomerang Beach, and Bluey's Beach are blessed with their own postcard waves shaped by prominent cliffs. Dolphins also love to show the rest of us how surfing should really be done in this place. This part of the NSW coast has remained miraculously undeveloped too.
