Explore Sydney in Google Street View

Sydney Harbour is a drowned river valley, which is a dry way of saying that the sea flooded a system of steep gullies and left an enormously complicated shoreline. The consequence for the city is that almost nothing is in a straight line and almost everywhere has a water view. In Street View this means you crest a hill on an ordinary residential street and the harbour appears at the end of it, repeatedly, in suburbs you have never heard of.

The Opera House is best approached on foot and the imagery allows it. The forecourt and the walk round to Bennelong Point were captured by trekker, so you can move right up to the shells and see that they are not white but tiled, in two shades, over a million of them. From a distance it reads as a single smooth surface; from three metres away it does not, and that is the detail photographs almost never show.

Walk across the Harbour Bridge. The pedestrian path on the eastern side is fully captured, and going across it virtually gives you the Opera House from above, the ferries crossing underneath, and the arch overhead the whole way. It is a better view than the one from the water and it costs nothing.

The coastal walk from Bondi to Coogee is the other essential route. Roughly six kilometres of clifftop path, captured on foot end to end, past four beaches and a cemetery that sits right on the edge of the cliff. Waverley Cemetery is the surprise of the walk: rows of white monuments facing the Pacific, with nothing between them and the horizon.

For the city as it is lived in, look at the terraces. Paddington and Surry Hills are dense grids of Victorian terrace houses with iron lacework verandas, built in the 1880s during a boom and saved from demolition in the 1970s by trade unions who refused to work on the sites. The streets are narrow, the houses are painted in colours nobody would have used originally, and the whole area is a short walk from the centre.

One geographical note that helps enormously. The harbour splits the city and there are only two crossings in the centre, the bridge and the tunnel. Understanding that explains the traffic, the ferry network, and why the northern suburbs feel like a separate place. Following a ferry route virtually, by hopping between the wharves at Circular Quay, Manly and Watsons Bay, is the fastest way to see how the whole thing fits together.