2007 April Archive at marinegirl

Archive for April, 2007

Cape du Couedic

29 April

I’ve always thought it would be really cool to live in a lighthouse, and although I’ve yet to find anywhere that will let me stay in the actual lighthouse itself, this came a pretty amazing second! I booked one of the lighthouse keepers cottages at Cape du Couedic through the Department of Environment and Heritage for South Australia. Although still operational, the lighthouse is now automated, and the three keepers cottages have been restored as heritage accommodation.The location was absolutely stunning. Set in the middle of the largest national park on Kangaroo Island, we were miles from anywhere, probably more than an hours drive from the nearest shop! No internet, no phones, no televison… but wallabies and a lighthouse outside our window and a pile of wood left for us to light the stove!

It was fascinating to read an account from someone who grew up living in Parndana Lodge (our cottage) in the 1930’s… trapping wallabies for stew, arguments between the lighthouse keeper and his assistants that meant they were forbidden from talking to the other families for weeks on end, supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables arriving only three times a year by boat, sending school work off in the post… if it felt remote for us, it’s difficult to imagine what it must have been like back then!While we were cooking dinner on our first night in the cottage, we both heard some odd banging noises. The other cottages were both empty, so it was a bit spooky. Rich ran around looking under all the beds and in the wardrobes for an intruder (who must have walked 20km to get there!!!). We later read lots of accounts of the “ghost” that rattles the kitchen window in the visitors books… although I blame the wallabies!The strong winds earlier in the week meant that while we were staying at Cape du Couedic we had to drive up to the North coast each day to go diving, so we didn’t have as much time as we’d have liked to explore Flinders Chase National Park. We did manage to get around our little corner of it though. Our lighthouse was just a few minutes walk from Admirals Arch - an archway carved out of the rock by the waves, under which lives a New Zealand Fur Seal colony. We watched the seal pups playing in the rockpools and their parents getting crashed against the rocks in the big surf as they came home for the night. We also made it to the Remarkable Rocks, which were…. well, pretty remarkable! These huge, totally bizarre rock formations sit up high on a cliff and look completely out of place with the surrounding geology. We got there quite late, after all the tourists had left, and stayed until we could see the lighthouse beam calling us home for dinner!

I only wish we could have stayed there a bit longer, to really soak up the remoteness.

More photos from Cape du Couedic

in Down Under and Wanderlust. Comment?

Diving Kangaroo Island

27 April

Crikey, it seems like a long time ago now, but here’s the rest of my holiday reports!After being blown out on the first couple of days, we finally managed to get underwater. Everyone else had their drysuits, and I was super-shivery in my 5mm wetsuit in the 17C water, but it was totally worth it!

Jim (Thistleton, of KI Diving Safaris) explained that the North coast of Kangaroo Island is the confluence of two major current systems, which leads to a bizarre combination of tropical and temperate species. The diversity of seagrass is just amazing, and everywhere is teeming with fish life. Jim guarentees that he’ll find you a leafy seadragon within two days, or he’ll give you another two days diving for free. That sounds pretty cocky, until you meet the guy, and you realise that he just knows the underwater environment here so well. True to his word, we found our leafy on the second dive.

By the end of the first day we were all experts at spotting the weedy seadragons, which stand out as being much bluer than the surrounding seagrass, but we had no chance at all with the leafys! Jim had to practically pick the thing up before I realised what he was trying to point out to me, and if you blinked for just a second they would disappear before your eyes! They really are masters of camouflage. But the undewater attractions don’t end with the seadragons. We had huge groupers and wrasse (bigger than me!) which followed us around, and pufferfish, and lobsters, and best of all - seals! It’s amazing how just looking at a seal can make you feel warmer! Just as we were ending our first dive we caught a glimpse of two playing below us… a teaser for what was to come.

On our final dive, we went for a ’seal dive’ - over to the rocky gullies where Jim knows they like to hang out. We quickly found three seals, who were happy to play with us and hung around for the whole dive! Before we went in, Jim taught us how to speak basic seal - we had to look fun to play with, or they would get bored quickly and move on. So there we were, akwardly somersaulting and spinning around desperately tring to entertain some very bemused looking seals! I’ve never felt so clumsy underwtaer before, they just move so quickly and elegantly through the water, it’s breathtaking. With all that underwtaer excersise I wasn’t cold for a second, and I had to keep checking my air, which was disappearing quick! It’s difficult to imagine how you could have more fun than that on a dive!

Check out some more of Rich’s underwater photos from Kangaroo Island here.

in Down Under and Underwater. Comment?

Kangaroo Island

25 April

I loved, loved, loved Kangaroo Island! It’s like a tiny chunk of the outback has been torn off and thrown out to sea… big expanses of remote nothingness, red dirt roads and heaps of wildlife. The island has a pretty impressive history too!

The first non-Aboriginal people to live on Kangaroo Island were sealers, escaped convicts and runaway sailors, who sought refuge here in the early 1800s. Why the Aboriginal people abandoned Kangaroo Island, or when they last lived here, remains a mystery.

Apart from one main road that loops around the island, all of the roads are unsealed, which makes for some entertaining driving! We were pretty careful though, and only had a couple of sliding sideways moments. You have to keep a keen eye out for animals too… we frequently had to stop for wallabies, roos and possums, less often for echidnas and goannas, and once for a huge black snake, which we thought was dead… until we went over for a closer look and it moved! Sadly we didn’t see a wild koala, apart from a couple of squashed ones. One of the cafes had a “Roadkill Recipes” book for sale! For a while we didn’t realise that the tracks we’d been driving past were actually the main roads marked on our map, and we drove right through Parndana, which is the largest settlement in the heartland of KI without realising it! Following the directions I’d been given, we eventually made it out to our accommodation - Gum Valley Retreat. It’s a lovely farmhouse-type building with a few motel rooms, being run by a couple of ladies from Canberra and Adelaide who come over to KI for the holiday season. We were spoilt with fantastic home-cooked three course meals and an open fire, and at night we had wallabies playing right outside the window.Unfortunately the wind was blowing too strong for us to get out diving, which was a bit of a disappointment, and meant we had to change our plans around a bit and go exploring first. Kangaroo Island has some fantastic local produce, and we made it our mission to sample all of it. We bought wild cranberry jam and olive oil made from wild olives, ate honey ice cream at Cliffords Honey Farm, did a tour of Emu Ridge eucalyptus distillery, shared a seafood platter with KI marron and bought an esky full of cheeses (halloumi to die for!) from the amazing Island Pure Sheep Dairy - where the sheep line up all on their own and file in to their favourite spot for milking twice a day! Oh, and we sampled plenty of the local wine!On the second day we drove along the south coast, taking windswept beaches complete with seals, underground cave systems and the amazing ‘little sahara’ - huge white sand dunes that spring up out of nowhere! Whilst the seals were very cool, they were completely outclassed by the pelicans, which arrive at the jetty in Kingscote at 5pm prompt every evening, when they know that an eccentric guy called John arrives with a bucket full of fish. We got up really close and were right in the thick of feathers and beaks fighting over their tea! Great fun.More Kangaroo Island photos

in Down Under, Edible and Wanderlust. Comment?

Bondi Beach

23 April

On our second day in Sydney we got up bright and early and headed over to the infamous Bondi Beach. All the locals go on about how it’s just full of tourists, and how the Northern beaches are much nicer, but I think it deserves it’s iconic status. Just look - it’s fantastic! Continue reading ‘Bondi Beach’

in Down Under and Wanderlust. Comment?

Sydney

22 April

Sydney was really cool… freezing in fact! I can’t believe how much I’ve acclimatised to living in North Queensland. We must have looked very funny, as Rich was sweating in shorts and a t-shirt and I was shivering in my jeans and a jumper!So, we could hardly go to Sydney without doing the tourist thing. We decided not to climb the bridge… it costs a fortune, and they don’t let you take your camera! For about $15 you can climb the ‘South East pylon’ and get great views of the harbour from there, so we did that instead, which I think was a good choice. We then went for a closer look at the Opera House, which really is an impressive building. Up close it’s all tiled, which I don’t think was what I was expecting! We also took a ferry across the harbour to Taronga Zoo, which was lots of fun. We liked the fishing cat and platypus best. We did stop short of having photos taken cuddling koalas though. Continue reading ‘Sydney’