Days 8 – 13: Kangaroo Island

Wow, when we finally got ferry over to Kangaroo Island I suddenly remembered why I haven’t been on a ferry for over 20 years – I have not felt so bad and sick in a long time! My only consolation was that I didn’t chunder all over the deck!

Kangaroo Island has been amazing. A few of our experiences have been;

• visiting a family run honey farm, tasting amazing honey, finding the queen bee and marveling at how industrious and organised bees are.
• cuddling a koala (WOW!)
• feeding kangaroos (wow-wow-wee-waa!B)
• feeling sad at all the road kill
• watching possums, echidnas, koalas and kangaroos just stroll through our camp site
• being surrounded by dozens of wallabies at night time
• resting up and getting a chance to reflect and catch our breath.

If you’re ever coming to South Australia, I cannot recommend Kangaroo Island enough. We’ve had a great time here. With an ‘overwhelming’ population of 4800, but still taking about 2 hours to drive across, Kangaroo Island is pretty rural. But it’s got a great atmosphere and there’s lots of little foody and wildlife orientated things to do.

When we got here at first, I was completely destroyed. We’d been on the road for 8 days solid without a break and had over-stretched ourselves. 8 days of solid driving, stopping, sightseeing, back in the car driving, sleeping, driving etc. You get the picture. So we decided that a)we needed to build in more downtime for ourselves to just chill out and what-not, and b) we needed more of a budget if we were going to actually enjoy our traveling experience and eat healthily and not get stressed out with the whole experience.

So, you learn a lot of things on the road and you can only learn these things by actually doing them. You need to find your own pattern and no-one else can dictate this for you – this we’ve learnt through personal experience and through all the people that we’ve spoken to. Every person has a different pace and a different pattern – we might need more chill-out time than others (especially considering that we’re taking a long trip) and we might be covering more distance than, well, most, but you’ve got to ‘find your stride’ and our time chilling out on KI allowed us to reflect and measure up all these things.

It’s also given us some of our real stand out experiences so far – feeding kangaroos and cuddling a Koala. We did both of these at an animal sanctuary called ‘Paul’s Place’ in the north. Here we got to feed the ‘road-kill joeys’ that he’s taken in over the years who are so gentle and love to be patted and stroked and eat out of your hand! How cool was that?!

(Incidentally, for those who are concerned about any commercial exploitation here – all these animals were rescued when they have been either abandoned in the wild or their mothers have been killed by a car on the road and they have survived as babies. They are then taken in, but once a wild animal leaves the wild it can’t return because it won’t survive. Therefore they must stay in captivity. But believe me, these animals didn’t have a hard life!….)

Another big thing for me was cuddling a koala. Photos to follow, but it was wonderful to have this cuddly thing holding onto you and feeling so natural about it.

Back at our campsite in the west, we were surrounded by wildlife. When you went back to your car/tent at night you suddenly realised that you were surrounded by dozens of wallabies. If you stood still all you could hear was the firm ‘tug-tug-tug’ of wallabies eating grass. Allow your eyes to get used to the light or turn on your torch and do a quick scan and you were surrounded by about 70 or so wallabies on a midnight forage! Fantastic. Plus, on our last night we had the chance to watch a koala just walk around the camp, up and down a few trees and then wander off on it’s business and we found an echidna rustling around in the shrub ground just behind our car. Echidna’s rock – fact, and it was great to watch one from a few feet away (they’re not scared of people because they haven’t had to learn to avoid people during their evolution).

From here it’s straight up to Adelaide. Here’s hoping that I manage that ferry a little better this time….

I get a little silly at Clifford’s Honey Farm

Bernice feeding a Kangaroo Island Kangaroo (they’re different to other ‘roos and are only found on the Island)

Me feeding some roos by hand – this was so fab!….

…but not as fab as this – cuddling a Koala – he was lovely. Although brief, this is a real standout experience for me.

This is an Echidna – again on KI they have blonder spines than their mainland counterparts. These guys are so cute – one of my favourite animals.

When camping at Flinders Chase in the west of KI, our car was surrounded by 70-100 of these guys – Tamar Wallabies (again, particular to KI).

Bernice standing atop the tallest dune in Little Sahara – which really was a Sahara like desert in the middle of KI!

~ by thesynapse on 18 February, 2009.