Day 11: On Kangaroo Island

We started off early this morning in Penneshaw, as we intended to go to Flinders Chase National Park, which unfortunately is all the way on the other side of the island! And at 150kms it is not a small island at all. The lady at the front desk of our hotel told us that, in spite of what we thought, the journey to Flinders Chase would take us only 90 minutes as the roads are good. We figured, with NZ in our minds as a reference, that driving the distance would take us at least 3 hours if not more, but the lady proved right: in slightly under an hour and a half we found ourselves at the visitors information centre of the National Park to pay the entrance fees.

The drive over has been great by the way, the weather has cleared quite a bit, yet we encountered many smaller rainstorms along the way which all passed us by on the left and right without hitting us. This produced very pretty rainbows all around, and combined with the scenic views of the island itself it was lovely all around.

One of the first things we saw on the way over to the NP was a Kangaroo Island Kangaroo, a slightly smaller and really brown coloured subspecies of the Western Grey Kangaroo found on the mainland. We even encountered some more on our way to Remarkable Rocks, a really odd formation of stones sitting on top of a granite dome right on the edge of the ocean inside The National Park. Halfway down the walking trail towards the Rocks, we saw that we would need to hurry to stay ahead of the rainstorm fast approaching form the sea, so it was a mad dash to get to the rocks. Luckily we found shelter inside one of them, which was only a good thing as the rain really came pouring down on us. Yes, we sheltered in a rock.

The other main attraction of the National Park is the Admirals Arch, a limestone arch where a colony of New Zealand Fur Seals has found its home. It’s really cool to be able to view these Seals as close by as we are, looking from the boardwalk created there. After all this, we decided to go back to the Visitors Centre, as they have a few short walks we can do. One of them is towards Platypus Waterholes, where a Platypus is rumoured to live. The walk is great, but we failed to find the Platypus. We did however spot a bunch of Koalas and even a Tammer Wallaby, which also is a subspecies of the ones found on the other side of the channel.

On the way back, we stopped at a place called Seal Bay, where we found not Seals, but Australian Sea Lions! They were in breeding season, so lots of babies lying around and suckling on their moms. Here, we also were able to get pretty close to them, so that is really cool. They also ignored us completely, and just kept doing what they normally do, which is great.

Tonight, we sleep in Kingscote, and tomorrow we’ll catch the ferry back to Cape Jervis. In fact, I’m typing this on the ferry itself! Yay for free WiFi!