12 – 15 May
There are a lot of down sides to travelling the south coast of Australia in the late Autumn / early Winter; it’s cold at night, and during the day sometimes, the weather is generally pretty rubbish, days are short, meaning cooking happens in the dark, dirt roads close due to them getting too muddy, it is difficult to dry things, I could go on. On the flip side it can be an amazing time to travel this part of the world; you can show up at the Kangaroo Island ferry terminal half an hour before sailing and squeeze onboard as standby, getting a great deal in the mean time, there is no-one on the beaches, on the roads, in the camp grounds. This is to such an extent that when standing in a parks and wildlife centre in Flinders Chase National park and asking the Ranger ‘is the camp site busy tomorrow night?’, to just get flat out laughed at, I knew as soon as I said it that we’d be the only ones there.
Highlights of Kangaroo Island:
Squeezing our Troopy on the ferry on standby. We were third in line and somehow got selected to be the two they could fit on. The guy ahead of us must have been pissed. We’re guessing it’s because we looked like we could actually back our vehicle into the tight spot they had without any fuss. Minor win; the Troopy not smashing other cars when the swell got a bit bigger (the brakes may have not have been on hard enough, and the only thing stopping the car from moving too much was the drivetrain with plenty of backlash in it). It did get a fair bit of interest from the other passengers though, being such a unique vehicle.
North Coast Road: The first part of our journey from Emu bay to Snelling beach. A dirt road which winds its way between inlets, coves and beaches along the north coast, as the name might suggest. Estelle did all of the driving while Marcel Played with all of the gadgets in the passenger seat and took in the drizzly scenery. Climbing through giant slabs of sandstone to get to some of the beaches was particularly cool. Another beach had what looked like a communal shack, with an old tractor half buried in the sand.
Remarkable Rocks. On the south coast of the Flinders Chase national park is a granite dome with huge granite slabs of rock weathering away on top of it. This was a complete surprise for me as I hadn’t seen any photos of it before or heard about it at all. As usual Estelle was all over this sort of stuff. We went up and walked all through these massive hunks of rocks, and luckily managed to get ten minutes of the setting sun to take some great photos of it.
Camping with the wildlife is kinda cool too, in particular the campgrounds seem to have Tammar Wallabies, endemic to Kangaroo Island hopping around, seemingly oblivious to our presence, even when they have a couple of torches shining on them. Very chilled animals.
The Ravine Walk in des Casoars Wilderness Protection Area in the north west corner of the island was day two. We went and did this particular walk on the second morning of our stay following a glowing recommendation from one of the park rangers. The walk starts off on the edge of the ravine (really a very steep gully) for about half an hour then winds its way down to the stream (read series of pools) at the bottom. After following the stream out to the coast it opens out to a small beach with rock walls on either side. Another tip from the ranger was to bring a torch as there were some caves on the beach. They actually went deeper than they appeared at first, and opened out inside to reasonable sized caverns with stalactites and all. One part of the cave system also had the sea coming into it.
Day three saw us check out the Cape Du Couedic Lighthouse and Admirals Arch with its colony of NZ fur seals. Following this we went to seal bay and refused to pay $18 each to walk on a boardwalk and look at the Australian equivalent. Lunch was a famous Kangaroo island whiting burger from Vivonne Bay followed by a walk along the beach.
Running low on fuel, we decided to head down to D’estrees Bay road, away from the fuel pumps. Marcel then decided to ‘conserve fuel’ for the trip home and switch to the second fuel tank which was empty, and sure enough, 10km down the road the engine stopped. Damn. To Estelle’s relief the car started again after switching back and we got to the campsite at sewer beach. Just great place names in this part of the world – for the record it was a beautiful beach.
The last half day started with a peaceful walk along the beach in the early morning sun, followed by a quick (but efficient) dash to American river, and their fuel pumps at the general store. The last stop on the island was the eucalyptus Oil distillery where they boil up and distil the oil out of eucalyptus leaves for use as a ‘do it all’ wonder oil for everything from cleaning to medicinal purposes.
The ferry then took us back to the mainland on perfectly calm seas, though a bit stinky as there were a couple of trailers of lambs on board.
M