Day 10: To Kangaroo Island

Posted on by

Waking up in Robe means, once again, an overcast sky with lots of wind and the chance of showers. But today, it doesn’t matter much, as we have a big day of driving in front of us, about 400km. While we are quite unfamiliar with these kinds of distances, it is not a strange occurrence over here as this country is just too big!

Along the way, about 100km in, we drove alongside the Coorong National Park, a very long (150km) stretch of coast where the dunes shelter off a thin strip of brackish lagune from the rough ocean. This NP is home for a large variety of wildlife, mostly water birds. We had some time to spare today, and so we visited some of the highlights of this park, specifically the ones you can drive to and don’t have to spend hours to see anything. 🙂

One of these is called Chinamans Well, and it tells the gruesome story of the Chinese migrants traveling along these coasts back in the 1850s to get to the goldfields in Victoria. Their story is a harsh one, where the weak wouldn’t make it to their destination or wouldn’t make it at all. This Chinamans Well is a water well constructed by the Chinese to provide water along the way, and is an interesting part of the local history over here. For the brief period of time we were out of the car and enjoying the scenery it was dry, only to start pouring down again the moment we sat back in the car. Lucky us!

Due to this weather, we arrived a little early at Cape Jervis where the ferry for Penneshaw leaves from, so we had a (terrible!) coffee at the local sports bar. We wouldn’t have visited it if it weren’t the only place open in this town. But it was, and so we spent the time there until it was time for us to board. The boat trip itself is only 45 minutes, but as the weather still was quite rough, the crossing was rather choppy which gave a few green faces on board. The funny thing was, that this wasn’t our first ferry today, as we unexpectedly found ourselves on a road leading towards a much smaller ferry to cross a river. Our GPS lead us to this ferry, as it reportedly were faster, and it probably was. It also gave us a nice interruption from driving, so all is well.

On Kangaroo Island we hope to visit Flinders Chase National Park, which unfortunately is on the other side of this 150km island, so we’ll probably drive quite a bit tomorrow as well!