Kangaroo Island

So at the end of the last blog entry, Amanda, Matt and I had just arrived back in Adelaide, and since Jenny had no room for us this time around, we decided to stay with Marion (the Buddhist hippy from last time). And then began our search for a car to get us back to Wollongong. Marion told us about a van she’d seen for just $500! We went to have a look at it, and the guy who was selling it told us outright that it was a piece of crap and that it was so cheap because he just wanted to get rid of it (he used to use it as a camper van but he’d just bought a $10,000 Winnebago). He clearly didn’t need the money, so we thought he might be legit. We took it for a test drive and it seemed mechanically sound, so we bought it, called it Reggie, and hoped that this deal wouldn't turn out to be too good to be true. He even threw in a tent, sleeping bag, road atlas, bottle of wine and some beer!

We couldn't see Jenny again until Sunday, since she was working nights, and her husband Mark was working days, but when we bought the Reggie, it was only Tuesday. We didn't really want to stay in Adelaide for all that time, because it's a tiny city compared to most, and we'd already seen a lot of it, so we decided to spend a few nights on the nearby Kangaroo Island. We booked our ferries and that night we were there! Arriving in the small town of Penneshaw (although for Kangaroo Island - KI - it was a big city) we saw that after sunset small penguins come to the beach after a day of catching fish. We stayed there hoping to see an army of penguins coming onto the sand, but sadly they didn't show up. Disappointed, we drove along the south coast looking for somewhere to stay. I was driving, but I'd left my glasses at Jenny's house so very nearly ran over half the island's population of kangaroos! It got to about midnight and I was too tired to drive any more, and too scared of hitting wildlife, so we pulled over near a B&B and slept in the van.

The next day we got up early and got away from the B&B before they noticed us and went for a walk next to a lagoon. We were hoping for a nice little swim, but it was a protected area, and the water didn't look that nice anyway. When we got back, we had a nice, healthy breakfast of doritos and tinned spaghetti before heading further along the coast. We found a café where we stopped to have tea when a galah wondered over to us and let us stroke it before biting my finger. A man with a strange beard came and picked it up, fed it some milkshake and told us about a raptor show that would start in about an hour. We thought we may as well go along since we had nothing better to do. It was really interesting learning about these birds of prey, how their habits differed and where we could see wild ones.

We'd picked up a leaflet with adventure activities, and if you're a regular follower of this blog, then you will know that this will have instantly appealed to me! That afternoon, we tried sand surfing for the first time in the island's "little Sahara" desert. At first, we were all pretty crap to be honest, but we soon got the hang of it. I was surprised I could do it, considering I can barely balance on a skateboard, and could only stand up for about half a second on a surf board, but I feel like by the time we had to hand the boards back, I was pretty good (as in, I could get down the dune without falling over...). The only bad thing about this experience was that we had to walk back up the dunes with the boards if we wanted to go again. I think this was the biggest workout I've had since I left Wollongong. We were too exhausted to do anything after climbing up the dunes so many times, so we found a nice little spot by the river and played cards until we couldn't see any more and went to bed.

Friday started with a four hour kayak session up and down the river, which was fun - especially when we fell out (trying to get back in was the best part, mainly for the amusement of the people still in their boats), and after this we went to the Kelly Hill caves, which is a very (geologically) young limestone cave, at a mere 2 million years old. Despite its young age, it still had hundreds of interesting cave formations like stalactites, stalagmites and apparently gravity defying helictites (one I'd never heard of before, and they are still an unexplained phenomenon). As we drove further along the coast, we saw a sign for a koala walk where we were "guaranteed to see koalas" so of course we had to go and do it. Sure enough, we saw a fair few of them, along with kangaroos and the rare KI echidna (an echidna is like a hedgehog crossed with a porcupine but with a long nose).

Even when we'd finished gawping at the adorable Australian fauna, there was still another three hours until sunset, so we drove further still along the south coast (this island is a lot bigger than we thought it would be) to the "Remarkable Rocks" - which did actually live up to their name, with an interesting story about their formation and the way they had been shaped by erosion. They were made better by the fact that it was so late and no one else was there.

Saturday, our last day on the island, started at the nearby Admiral's Arch, where a colony of New Zealand fur seals made their home. We watched for a while as they lazed on the rocks, and some of the males play-fought, and we spotted a pup that had either lost its mum or had been rejected. It was heart breaking to watch it go from female to female trying to get some attention, but there wasn't much we could really do, so we just left. We then went to seal bay to see some more seals - Australian fur seals this time. Amanda and I took the guided tour so that we could go onto the beach, get close up, and hear some facts from the guide. Here is one of the facts: once females mature, they are impregnated for eighteen months, and eight days later are impregnated again, so they are constantly pregnant and breast feeding. I feel like I know a few people like this from school.

To break up the drive back to the ferry port, we decided to stop off wherever sounded interesting. We ended up going to a sheep dairy farm to sample some sheep's milk cheese and yoghurt (actually quite nice) at a distillery and a winery where we sampled some posh spirits, wines and walnuts (laced with limoncello). When we got back to Penneshaw, we went for a dip in the crystal clear ocean while we waited for the ferry and reflected on the great few days that we'd had.

But then, on the drive back to Adelaide, disaster struck. The temperature gage suddenly kept getting higher and higher, forcing us to pull over at what I thought was a garage (it was actually a house) where three helpful men (real men, that knew about cars, not like Matt and me) gave us some water for the radiator and made us at ease by talking to us and telling us that they didn't think it would be too bad. After a while, we set off again, but not long after, the temp rose again. When we turned the engine off we could hear the water in the radiator boiling - it was REALLY hot. We stopped again to let it cool down and set off again. Reggie seemed to run fine and managed to get us back to the city, but when we turned the engine off this time, it kind of spluttered and coughed before it went silent and revealed plumes of smoke coming from the engine.

The next day, Reggie wouldn't start. Definitely bad times. We were stuck in Adelaide. Luckily we'd booked him in with the mechanic on Tuesday (the lazy sod didn't work Saturday, Sunday or Monday, but he was recommended to us by Marion). All we can do now is await his verdict. We hope you get better soon Reggie!

A wild [insert name of potentially lethal animal here] appears!!

So, anyone who knows me will also know that I am scared of just about everything that life throws at me. Being in Australia has not helped this fact, since all of the wildlife is absurdly different to the way it is back home. Don't get me wrong, some of it is beautiful and amazing, but, as predicted, I am constantly terrified of everything around me.

I'll start with some of the nice stuff. For example, the birds here are beautiful! There are wild parrots all over the place, and each one seems to have a different, but equally amazing pattern. What with Wollongong being a seaside town, there are obviously seagulls, but their beaks and legs seem to be much more of a vibrant red colour than the ones back home. There are even a few pelacans who swim around the harbour on a regular basis (pretty much all the time, I see them every time I'm there). Even the ducks look different (they have really thin necks, and really big heads... I always think it looks like the head should fall off).

No matter what they look like, the birds seem to have confidence in excess. It takes a lot to make some of them fly away. The parrots are pretty playful and just fly around you (or maybe that's just me..?). There are cockatoos everywhere, and one of them even came and landed on my balcony while I was studying out there one time (I almost pooped my pants). They're a lot bigger close up, and it looked angry so I gave it an orange but it wouldn't go away. I resorted to shouting at it through the fly guard so that it couldn't get me.

The cockatoo that landed on my balcony and scared me so much

It's spring over in Australia at the moment, which of course means that all of the chicks are hatching. There are a few families of ducks that live on campus, and there are road signs to tell drivers to watch out for crossing ducklings. The parent ducks can actually be pretty hostile (I've had one hiss and charge at me as I walked past). Apparently a big thing over here is the danger of swooping magpies. I've been told that if you walk under a tree that has a magpie nest in it, then mama magpie will swoop down at you and try to peck your eyes out! There was a warning email telling us to avoid a certain part of campus that magpies are known to nest in, and I've not quite mustered up the courage to walk past there yet. There is a wikipedia article which makes the whole affair sound terrifying ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Magpie ) and the magpies are huge over here, so I don't think I'll be taking my chances any time soon.

Recently there has been a chicken wondering around the uni campus and around our accommodation. No one knows where it came from, and one day I wasn't concentrating on where I was going and ran into it at the top of my stairwell. I was so shocked when I saw it that I actually yelled (it probably sounded something like "ARRRGHHGHHAAAAHHHWWOOOAAHHAH"). I had no idea what I should do with it, so eventually I went to get Tash who helped me shoo it down the stairs.

As for the aquatic life over here, I find it fascinating. One day, Charlie and I were walking through campus. She looked into one of the many ponds and just said "WHAT THE F*** IS THAT?!" When we went to look a little bit closer, we saw that there were dozens of eels in the water along with a heap of small fish. I remember being shocked that something which is so "exotic" to us could be in suck close proximity to us the whole time and we hadn't noticed. Another time, I was walking to class and noticed a tortoise on the side of the foot path. I sat there for about five minutes just watching it poke its head in and out of its shell, and was devastated when I realised that I'd forgotten my camera (not left the house without it since to avoid other similar happenings). And when Charlie, Amanda, Debs and I were checking out the rock pools on the beach, we saw some red lump and couldn't decide was it was, so of course we poked it with a stick to find that it was an octopus!! That was probably my favourite find of the trip so far! It's not all fun and games though, because as summer goes on, there is more and more likelihood of jellyfish being in the water. No one has ever died from the sting of a blue bottle jellyfish in Australia, but I've heard the sting hurts like hell.

I haven't seen many reptiles apart from small brown lizards while I've been here, I saw a pretty big one today though and managed to get a picture before it scurried away. Wherever I go though there are warning signs about brown snakes and black snakes and other assorted dangerous snakes. I'm kind of curious to see one, but would probably be petrified if I did.

I haven't really seen anything in terms of wild mammals apart from the possums that live around campus. The Australians hate them and consider them to be vermin, but I think they're adorable and stroke them whenever they come down. The cutest thing was that when we first arrived in the country, one of them had just had a baby, and would come down with the baby on its back. There are, of course, the kangaroos and koala bears over here, but we don't see much of them in Wollongong, and the only experience we've had with them are in zoos. We did see a few wild roos on the road trip, but not for very long.

So I've talked about birds, fish, reptiles and mammals, so it is inevitably time to talk about creepy crawlies. After all the scare stories I was told before I came here, I am VERY relieved to say that I have had very little contact with spiders of any kind. When I first got here, I would check under my duvet and under the toilet seat for any that might have been under there, but after about a month I realised that I was just being silly, and that doing these things was probably not necessary... A small spider did land on me the other day when I was taking a walk, and I didn't crap my pants when I saw it, so I'm probably getting closer to being over my phobia. 

There are some pretty crazy bug here though, for example, there was a green thing on the wall of our stairwell that didn't move for about a week, about the length of you average MP3 player. I always dodged around it, and one time I came close to poking it with a stick, but I couldn't bring myself to do it, and I was scared that it would eat me (obviously an irrational fear because it obviously wouldn't have eaten me...), and then one day it just wasn't there anymore.

When we were in Nimbin, us Europeans had our first experience with fireflies. They looked so beautiful as they danced around the forest. Hamish even managed to catch one so that we could have a look at one up close, and seeing its back end light up like that was just bizarre. There are also lots of dragonflies around the Gong. I've seen them before in England, but not as big as these ones, and the other day I was lucky enough to find one that was just sitting on a flower, resting. It didn't seem too bothered that I was coming closer, and it sat there and posed for about five minutes while I took photos of it. Then of course there are the many multitudes of different bees, moths, butterflies, ants (I saw a massive flying ant land on my window and start chowing down on a bug it had caught which was about the same size as it), and other mini monsters that live around Australia, but I'll write some more about them once I've seen a little more of them.

In other news, I finally decided where I'm going to WWOOF! I'm going to live in the "Earthship" for a week and help make the final touches and help out with the farm animals. Below is a link to their website, and if you get a chance you should look around it and have a read of what they're all about, because I found it really interesting.

http://homepages.callplus.net.nz/~b.gubb/

I can't wait for uni to be over, and for the three month break to get here. Plans so far are to go to NZ from 20th Nov, work on that farm for a week, meet up with the Norwegians/whoever else is there at the time to explore the country for the remainder of my three weeks there, fly back to Melbourne on 20th Dec, be in Albury for Christmas (at Flic's house) and in Sydney for New Year's Eve! From there I'm not quite sure what I'm doing, but I'm sure I'll figure it out :)