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Published: July 14th 2006
Seemed as though my urine smelled of Riesling this morning but I could have been mistaken.
The journey to Kangaroo Island involved first a 1.75 hour coach ride to Cape Jervis then a ferry to Penneshawe, which was distinguished purely by an enormous sausage roll and a dolphin sighting on the ferry. The man from Budget car rental was there to meet me, dangling the keys to a Nissan Pulsar, helpfully in white to show up the dust from all the unsealed red ironstone roads I'll be driving on.
All the blurb had led me to believe that Kangaroo Island was teeming with animals, but it didn't seem to be exactly jam-packed as I took the road out of Penneshawe under a leaden sky. The extent of human habitation was sufficiently minimal that there were signposts to almost every building on the island.
I'll note in passing that the car deal wasn't a great one. Though Budget had undercut Hertz on price, the limited km you got for free each day were woefully inadequate for the distances you need to drive to see anything, e.g. to drive from one end of the island to the other and back
Koala
At Hanson Bay Sanctuarywas roughly equal to my entire km budget. And with the national park at the opposite end of the island to Penneshawe, it's inevitable that you'll do this drive. Hence if you're going to hire a car on Kangaroo Island, understand the distances involved before making your decision.
The further I got from Penneshawe, the more roadkill I encountered, ranging from pancaked brush-tailed possums still in situ to kangaroos that had been hauled off the road by the luckless motorist that had struck them. The latter were in various stages of decay, from so fresh that I was disturbing a murder of crows when I approached, to so old that only a dusty pile of bones remained.
My first stop was Seal Bay, home of an Australian sea lion reserve. The guided beach walk was informative, despite the presence of an annoyingly curious (about the sea lions, not me) lady. With "Observation not interaction" being the reserve's philosophy, we were told to move as a group (if seen as individuals, an aggressive male sea lion might attack), and give the sea lions a wide berth. They do smell rather, but have a certain level of cuteness, and their
pelt is furry as demonstrated by the "touch table" in the Visitor Centre. The adults will go off to sea for 3 days at a time, ranging up to 100km away, in order to find food. And the females will only breed on the beach on which they were born.
Lunch was a greasy all-day breakfast at Vivonne Bay, served by a man with bugger grips and a thick West Country accent.
Thus fortified, I then proceeded to Kelly Hill Caves. On the way there, I was starting to feel a little depressed at the dearth of wildlife up to that point when, in quick succession, I spied a kangaroo standing roadside under a tree, and then what appeared to be a large yellowish hedgehog but which was in fact an echidna. By the time I'd braked, done a uey, and driven back, it was beetling off into the undergrowth and I only got a maximum zoom shot of its retreating rear. Echidnas are monotremes, a family of mammals also including the platypus that have some reptilian characteristics. You can see them in Australia and Papua New Guinea, but nowhere else.
The cave tour was a little
disappointing, with me being the only punter, and the guide being not the most natural of communicators.
Unfortunately by this point the sun was beginning to set, and it was then I realised why i) there was so much roadkill, and ii) why my car insurance was invalid from dusk until dawn. From all angles, kangaroos, wallabies and possums started to appear on the road. Some just bounded over, others stopped in the middle to ponder what an earth approaching headlights could mean. It was a game of real-life Frogger. Creatures scuttled around at the outer fringes of my headlights, while shadowy marsupials dashed across in my rear-view mirror. After a couple of near misses, I was sufficiently unnerved to lower my speed to 60 km/h, resulting in me arriving at the hostel about 1.5 hours later than I'd warned them.
My room wasn't a dorm, rather it contained 2 single beds, which I wasn't going to complain about. The owner subsequently told me this was because she couldn't be bothered to lay the fire in the dorm. I didn't actually speak to the owner until the following day, as when I approached her house later in the
evening, furious barking erupted from a dog whose whereabouts were unknown in the dark, and I beat a hasty retreat to the hostel.
The only other person in the place, who I ended up chatting with for the rest of the evening, was a German guy called Pieter who was in the middle of a cycling world tour, having already gone from Germany to Nepal, with New Zealand and parts of Australia also under his belt. His English was fine, but he only seemed to have one synonym for things that weren't good, so "shit" was used to describe the full gamut from slightly below average to absolutely appalling. His site is at
Globetreter, though you'll need more than a smattering of German to understand it.
On the next day, my first stop was at Little Sahara, an area of sand dunes that is notable more because of its incongruousness - right at the edge of some scrub land - than any resemblance to the African desert.
Next came Hanson Bay Sanctuary, which had a self-guided koala walk consisting of an L-shaped path surrounded by gum trees. Though I was unable to get any good close-up shots,
there were plenty of koalas crawling around in the upper branches. You had to be wary of the occasional hail of koala droppings pelting down from above, but otherwise it was a pleasant experience.
My next stop was at Flinders Chase National Park, which occupies much of the western end of Kangaroo Island. I did a platypus waterholes walk, a leisurely 4.5 km stroll first through a goose-infested swamp and then through a forest. One of the more informative boards along the way indicated that most platypuses disappear (to no-one knows where) from March to August, which explains my own fruitless search. I also saw no other animals apart from a few birds.
At the southwest corner of the park is Admiral's Arch, a natural rock formation through which you can see the pounding sea. Nearby is a New Zealand fur seal colony, which smelled as bad as their flippered cousins in Seal Bay.
Not far away are Remarkable Rocks, a monolith geologically similar to Uluru but physically nothing like it (i.e. neither big nor red). A couple of the rocks, when the afternoon sun hit them, looked as though they were out of a surrealist painting,
but my verdict was that they were Fairly Interesting rather than Remarkable.
This time I made sure I was back at the hostel by nightfall to avoid any unseemly kangaroo catastrophes, but this did highlight one problem with the island - to get the best photos you need to be out and about at dawn and dusk, but these are also the peak times for animal collisions.
With Pieter having wobbled off into the distance this morning, I was alone in the hostel, so I increased my knowledge of Australian "Big Brother" before heading bedwards.
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