Up at 5:45 to stagger around to corner to catch the Kangaroo Island coach at 6:30 for 6:45. Either we weren't told much [which is true] or it's badly organised but it wasn't obvious what was going on. The YHA voucher has to be exchanged for SeaLink vouchers and boarding passes and then there's more than one bus doing the trip for SeaLink. The driver is pretty informative on the way down the coast but despite a late night in the cafe and early start (including bin men at 4:30am) I didn't have a good night's kip and doze off in the early morning sun.
More confusion at Cape Jervis as our boarding passes were good for the ferry but no-one told us that and we all stood in a check-in queue for nothing. An easy ride over the Backstairs Passage and another driver and guide for the trip. This guy's good and barely stops talking for the journey all the way across the Island for lunch. Lunch is a BBQ cum grill affair that's OK and generally wolfed down as it counts as a very late breakfast. There are a few koalas and some cockatoos in the trees.
We head round the corner to the Remarkables, more remarkable than
the eroded granite is the theory as to their creation. For some
reason the top band of upwelled granite gets lots of cracks in it
which weather and form the sculptures. Why didn't the granite bulge
they're sat on, surely under greater stress, suffer the same? 
.
Up the road at Cape de Couedic is Admirals Arch, the leftovers of a collpased limestone cave which is home to a howling gale and a colony of NZ fur seals. The thick impenetrable bush round here suffers and odd wind fate. The stronger the wind nearer the coast, the shorter the bush grows. Over a 1km driver toward the coast it [uniformly] shrinks from 5m to less than 1m.
The final major stop and "highlight" of the trip was a trip to Seal Bay and a guided tour onto the beach so see at a distance the Australian seal lions. Their lifestyle is different to other seals in that they spend half their time on land only braving the great white sharks for 2-3 days at a time (making a thousand of more 200m dives in the process). Their time on land is spent, surprisingly, resting (and fighting and mating and...).
By this time most people on the bus are dozing. The ferry back was a bit worse as the driver took to getting the sea to shake and roll the whole boat more than necessary. The coach back to Adelaide was exceedingly slow, I think the driver knew he had a crappy bus and seemed to be treble-declutching from the speed of the gear changes. An early night tonight (OK, half eleven going on twelve) as there's plenty to do tomorrow and it's going to be a scorching 39C in Adelaide. Funnily, I don't think the Barmy Army will have much to cheer about.
Adelaide YHA, Adelaide S34.92636 E138.59451 Elev. 26m
Copyright 2003 Ian Fitchet. All rights reserved.