KI! 8th – 10th May

Very kindly John dropped me off at the bus stop in Glenelg. I’d booked my tour with a company called Groovy Grape (www.coralseaecojetsafari.com.au), think it was around $250 or something which included all food, ferry crossing, pick up, etc etc. Was a good way to do it. The tour guide was fine, a Kiwi guy who’d been doing it for years and seemed to know most of his stuff, and seemed to care about the keeping it Eco part of it and all that. Was a backpacker tour, so 4 other Scottish girls (Katy, Louise and Amy) were on it and a guy called Scott who normally worked in the office, think he was the son of the guy who owns the company just coming along to check out what the tour does. From Glenelg it was quite a treck, about two hours, and the tour guide, Simon, stopped us off at one of his favourite bakeries on the way…rather awkwardly I did my best to avoid the full on gluten on display as lovely as it all looked, particularly as I’d marked myself down as trying to avoid wheat on the tour…as Willow says, Bread, just say No! To keep it cheap the tour drives a bus to the ferry and then transports all the stuff on to a car the ferry company drives on to the ferry…then we pick up another car on the other side, a bit of a rigmarole, but still, saved around $100 on the ticket price apparently. Once on Kangaroo Island, in some lovely sunshine I might add, we went
along red unsealed roads to Prospect Hill…it was quite a treck up, several hundred wooden steps, the view was pretty impressive, almost worth it! Apparently Matthew Flinders climbed this hill in 1802 trying to get his bearings, it moiders about this at the top…I remember it saying something about likening him to backpackers…

Anyway, after that we drove through the Flinders National Park, stopping at one point to see where the fires in 2009 nearly burnt the whole Island, moving at 60mph across the Island apparently – the tour guide tride on the roads to get up that fast to demonstrate at one point, but due to the bendy unsealed roads couldn’t quite get there! Then, the wind took a turn and the fire burnt back across itself. Apparently around 9000 koalas get burnt in that fire…the population is doing OK though, there’s still 21000 of them…nearly 20999 on the evening as it was crawling along the road to get to the other side and we nearly squished it. Apparently at night when loads of the wildlife comes out, you’ve get a better chance of not hitting things if you keep up your speed…makes for an interesting swervy sort of journey! It was someone else who told me the keep up the speed thing, not the tour guide…Then after viewing the fire damage we went and prepared our lunch on one of the cool bbqs they have around in Australia – you just turn up and there’s gas and you cook your food and there’s picnic tables, you just bring the food and the stuff to prepare the food, I think it’s sooooo cool, they do it in parks and things, and it’s obviously quite a good community thing as well. We also drank rainwater there, apparently that’s fine…and it seemed to be as well...no after effects.
Then we went to, I don’t know where…I wish I’d had a map with me so I could get my bearings as the tour guide drove us around…but anyway, we saw lots of seals, and they were cool, we saw some fighting too which was kinda fun…it was very blustery and cold, so I’m glad I had scarves and hats and long trousers…the crazy Scottish girls were all wearing short shorts…they were under 30 though ;-) Here’s a map of the Island if you’re interested…www.flipflopflap.com.au/images/kimap.pdf. After sighting the seals we drove off to

‘The Remarkables. They were just rocks, but they looked cool…and I got some nice photos there as the sun started to head down…we then did a little walk near The Remarkables in the hope of catching a decent sunset, but there was too many clouds. At 6pm in the dark we headed off to our home for the night in the middle of the island. It was at the end of a very big field, a broken down little house with bunk beds…with bat poo all over them…so somewhat reluctantly I was reasonably keen to sleep in Swag bags outdoors as suggested…if people do this thing all the time, it must be OK, right?
As a cautionary measure I decided to leave my contact lenses in to sleep in, so I could at least wake up to see the Kangaroo punch me in the nose, or whatever…We cooked dinner and had a campfire with marshmallows and I drunk Bundaberg, yay! If you go visit in the height of the season here you can’t light fires, sometimes even light barbeques outside in case they initiate a bush fire! Oh yep, where we stayed, there were like hundreds of kangaroos and wallabies, it was pretty cool, and we had a possum who was very interested in what we were up to as well. Sleeping in the swag bag was pretty cool, we saw all the amazing stars with barely any light pollution and the milky way, incredibly! It got pretty dewy, so the only issue was that I couldn’t really move my head from the original spot as it’d get soaked!

On the Sunday morning, we were awoken bright and early by the tour guide with a hot chocolate and then pancakes (gluten free I might add!) what a fab breakfast…think it was 7am? This was part of the whole plan, but apparently also he’d had to move his swag bag away from our little gang due to my ‘purring’ all night…I had to teach him this phrase as it’s rude to suggest that girls do anything as vulgar as snoring.
In the early morning dewy sunshine we headed off to go sandboarding…not sure it was full on sandboarding really, but we had boards and lay on our tummys down a hill, it was pretty cool, once you could get the board moving and the impressive dunes were, well, impressive too! After that we headed off to a Sea Lion spot on the Island, you had to pay to enter (part of the package) and were guided by a Ranger (with the silly hat and everything! ).

Apparently the sea lions had been known to run up after tourists, so we were a bit cautious as we headed down to see them…two of the girls were too scared and stayed unreasonably far back. Those sea lions can move pretty fast though considering their daft legs. Apparently we were witnessing them just before the female sea lions birth day…female sea lions carry their foetus around for 18 months! Then they have nine days off and are impregnated again and have to take care of the new one and carry another around for 18 months…mental. Oh yep, in the morning on the bus as well we had to grind the van to a holt as a wedge tailed Eagle swooped in front of us (or a Wedgy as the tour guide called it!). In the early afternoon we went to a Eucalyptus distillery, a bit touristy, and they had a thing about Emu oil, apparently good for eczema…not noticed any significant effects so far…for lunch we went to a beach that the tour guide really liked, you had to work through rocks to get to it, was pretty cool, and nicely empty, so we lay in the sunshine for quite a while – this time of year sunblock doesn’t seem so necessary weirdly, quite odd considering when I arrived you’d burn in 5 minutes! Then we headed back and caught an amazing coloured sunset.

I stayed at the Sebel Playford in Adelaide that evening…quite a step up from a swag bag…still, both experiences were pretty good! I spent a couple of hours using their gym and pool (practicing my new stroke techniques and swiss ball exercises) which was lovely and relaxing – had the whole place to myself.