Wildlife on Kangaroo Island

The variety of wildlife we got to see on Kangaroo Island was spectacular. Kangaroos everywhere, possums, echidnas, Koalas, Sea Lions, Seals, Wedge Tail eagles.

Heres the cute little Koala we spotted up a tree just outside our cottege. We were lucky to catch him awake - Koalas sleep for 20 hours of the day sometimes! ...



This spiky thing is an Echidna. Those spikes are really sharp! He's the only animal that can dig straight down and the second we gathered around him that's exactly what he did. A couple of minutes later he had completely buried himself. Not exactly a lightning getaway, but very clever nonetheless.




Literally hundreds of Kangaroos passed through the field in front of the cottege, here's just some of them ...





Then a little further down the coast of the island there was lot of sea lions and seals - pretty cool!

The Remarakable Rocks

These were a strange sight in the National Park on the island - The remarkable rocks. Some of them look like some sort of Dali painting, which looks a little surreal.

Little Sahara and Sandboarding

Right in the middle of Kangaroo Island is a huge strange region called "Little Sahara" which looks like a big sandy desert in the middle of the island. Strange, but the perfect place for sand boarding! It's a bit like surfing except on sand. Great craic! I must have gone up and down about ten times in the space of half an hour!

Kangaroo Island

About three hours out of Adelaide you arrive at Kangaroo island. Up until about three weeks ago the whole region had had an average rainfall compared to the Sahara for the past couple of years, but suddenly the drought broke as the rains came. The island apparantly has gotten beautiful again very quickly as all the former vegitation spouts back to life.

Winter down here is the low season, so out of a group of 8 on the tour we had 1 tour guide, 2 other trainee tour guides, an Argentinian, a Belgian and amazingly 3 of us were Irish.

We toured the island for two days and stayed in their wilderness cottege that night. It was in a really nice spot, teaming with wildlife. I managed to try Kangaroo ('roo') steak for the first time - A really lean meat, and very tasty ... but not as nice as beef. The roo burgers were lovely too. Another Australia institution is Vegemite - A vegitable version of Marmite - it was invented and sent to the Australian POWs during WW2 to supplement their lack of vegetables in the camps and sent over to them. I didn't think it was very nice - a bit like putting lots of soya sauce on your toast.

The weather was a little bit cold on the island. Some of the group were dying to sleep outside in the wilderness for an authentic bush camp. I couldn't bring myself to it in this weather, so I bunked in the cottege. They slept out in 'swags' - Big, thick, matress like, sleeping bags and are in fact very warm ... unfortunately the ones they had were not so waterproof and it deluged through the whole night ... not good.

Adelaide

Adelaide in the winter seemed a little quiet and downbeat. "people just move here to retire" one person told us. We looked around, it had a nice market, chinatown, etc. I imagine it might be a fun city to live in, but we were ready to move on from here fairly quickly.

Cook - Population: 4

The train stopped in the eerie ghost town of Cook, in the Nullarbour plain. The town only had a population of 4! Apparently the town was a busy train stop many years ago, but its heyday was long gone. It was strange walking around the remnants of old schools and abandoned houses and closed roads.

Crossing the Nullarbour

From Perth, we took the train to Adelaide, in one of the world's great train journey's across the south of the continent. The main, underlying feature of the trip is endless Nullarbour ("no tree") plain that is to be crossed. It definintely gives you a great feel for the vastness of the continent. The plain is covered in nothing but patches of low, scrubby grass and is dead flat, with virtually no water. One stretch of track is the longest continuous stretch of straight railroad in the world and is accompanied, not too far away, by a corresponding longest stretch of straight highway.

Heading East 30th May 2007

After three weeks from Darwin to Perth it was time to head east. Our first stop is Adelaide. We'll try to get to Melbourne to visit Conor then ... then we'll see how far up the east coast we can get!