marinegirl

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