Adelaide to Kangaroo Island:

A Short Hop

I don’t believe in re-incarnation, but if I did Adelaide, Australia would be the place I would request to live in during my second life span. (My wife suggests I would probably merit New Jersey but that’s another story.)

Adelaide is called the City of Churches by some, the City of Gardens by others. Both are probably true, but visiting during the early stages of summer, we found Adelaide to be breath-taking in its

flowering beauty. Everywhere you look, there are flowers, flowering trees and gardens that would make a Minnesota gardener pine in envy. The early planners of the city back in the 1800s, laid the city out in a make-sense pattern. Additionally, they surrounded the downtown area with a complete square of parkland that remains to this day. We are not talking a token, affirmative-action patch of land-park, but blocks of parks that are plum full of recreational fields, gum trees, walking and jogging paths, gardens and just about anything else that is remotely connected with leisure.

You literally cannot leave the downtown area of Adelaide and reach a leafy suburb without crossing many blocks of park land in any direction. Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, is a very relaxed city of about a million people. No one

seems in a huge hurry, even on the wide streets that make driving a breeze for folks from right-handed driving countries.

Though we made Adelaide our headquarters for some wonderful times spent touring the world-famous vineyards as well as the superlative beaches, it was an island about two hours south of Adelaide that was on our minds as we planned our trip for this part of Australia. We got up early one morning to drive from our self-serviced, 2BR apartment near city-center in Adelaide to Cape Jervis, the jumping off point to Kangaroo Island, Australia’s third largest island. (Tasmania, Melville are one, two.)

As SeaLink, the government run ferry service advertises, there are only two ways to get to Kangaroo Island from the mainland, swim or take the ferry. Actually there is a third way as KI also has a landing strip for small aircraft, but we opted for the ferry. The ferry leaves Cape

Jervis a half dozen times during the day, arrives in Penneshaw 45 minutes later, then returns to Cape Jervis, ferrying passengers, vehicles and supplies. As the island is quite large, nearly 60 miles long, we chose to ferry our car over so we would have transportation while staying for several days. Taking the ferry is not cheap; for the three of us plus our car, the cost came to over $290 Australian and once on the island, petrol is more dear than chicken milk at $1.10 per liter which comes out to over $3.25 a gallon. Daily ferry service did not begin until the 1980’s so the tourist business on the island is still in its infancy, though Aussies know how to charge high prices for anything that moves and even higher for things that don’t.

We discovered several trips ago, that when Australians advertise something is “as good as Disneyland” they really are saying to be prepared to pay Disneyland prices for whatever it is they are offering. Less than 4,500 people inhabit the island and many of those who do are fourth and fifth generation families that often began with one or both of the family founders coming from a stock of criminals, ship deserters or other social malcontents. Many men who initially came to the island to escape regular life, brought with them Aboriginal wives so many of the descendants today are of mixed heritage.

Primary industries on this desolate island are farming and commercial fishing. Tourism now ranks third and is rapidly gaining on the others.

We stayed in a sprawling 3BR house overlooking the bay in the small ferry-landing town of Penneshaw. Penneshaw is so small it makes Deerwood seem like it needs traffic lights. But as we traveled throughout the island we found only one other town was larger. Traveling up and down the island became an adventure.

One day we saw more dead kangaroos along side the road than we saw cars. Mile after mile would pass without any sightings of other humans or even of farms. The desolation was eerie. One retail merchant laughed as he told us a number of young, idealistic couples come out to the island each year to live, convinced they have found the tranquility center of the earth only to leave within a year because they cannot stand the solitude of the island. Kangaroo Island is home to kangaroos, wallabies, echidnas, possums of various families, seals, sea lions, penguins, other birds that defy description, snakes, koalas, wild turkeys, plus scores of unusual animals and creep, crawling things. To complete a tourist’s fantasies, there are a full complement of sharks and whales in the surrounding waters. A day’s drive around the island will usually afford a glimpse of all of the above at various places and times of the day. As the accompanying

photos show, the attractive, geographical features of the island mirror that of the continent of Australia in that they are nearly all on the beach side. Miles of undeveloped beaches, unspoiled by construction or tourists

line the island. On the protected north side, the

beaches tend to be calmer, more safe to swim in and have

less of the wild wind and waves that mark the south side of the island.

Balancing out the south side of the island, however, are the views that look like God has been at work very recently. The views are striking, they silence the human heart and cause conversations to cease. There is a freshness to the unspoiled beauty that suggests a time when only the animals, birds and flora existed and their existence was uncomplicated by the presence of man and machine.

Three experiences during our days on Kangaroo Island stand out. One, while visiting the Admiral’s Arch and Remarkable Rocks in the Flinders Chase National Park, helicopters were circling overhead as though searching for something. When we arrived at the Remarkable Rocks site, we discovered two young

men had drowned while seeking to rescue a German tourist who had ignored warning signs and had slipped over the edge of the giant monoliths to the sea some 75 feet below. Ironically, a rescue helicopter two hours later winched him to safety while a fishing trawler picked up the two bodies of the drowning victims. The island is very isolated and has minimal emergency facilities. For example, the nearest ambulance is over two hours from Remarkable Rocks and the rescue helicopter was dispatched from Adelaide, a trip of an hour and a half.

Another experience, a much more light-hearted one, was the opportunity to see penguins in their natural habitat. The first night we stayed on the island, the three of us were startled out of a deep sleep by sounds that were akin to those of a cat with its tail caught in the crack of a closing door. The mystery of this sound was solved the next night when we saw hundreds of penguins pop out of the surf, then waddle up to their young awaiting their once daily feeding. Their shrieks rent the air, a shocking volume to the cries coming out of their little bodies. Penguins react to camera flashes by going completely blind

for about five minutes. I felt bad when I came back to the place on the road where I had taken pictures and found several of them holding each other’s flippers and feeling their way down to their burrows. The third experience that carved a notch on our memory stick was to walk amongst seals on Seal Beach on the south side of the island. After spending several days at sea, diving

sometimes as deep as several hundred feet while hunting, the seals come back to Kangaroo Island to rest. Many times, the seals only make it out of the surf by a few feet before flopping down and not moving for hours. Due to the size of the male seals, 400-600 pounds, plus the fact they have poor eyesight,

park officials keep a pretty close watch on wandering tourists so they do not become human bowling pins to a charging seal. As we prepared to leave Kangaroo Island and continue our 4,000 mile road trip through five Australian states, we felt as though we had stepped into a fantasy world filled with an abundance of strange and wonderful flora and fauna.