Change In Plans

Greetings from Snellings Beach, on the north shore of Kangaroo Island, Australia!  Warnings of imminent death notwithstanding, we had an amazing first full day here.  At this point, KI (as it is called) would definitely be in the Top 5 “must go” places on our trip.

 Unfortunately, we still lack the ability (temporarily) to upload photos, so I will have to rely on my shaky descriptive abilities and several thousand words.  Just kidding about the several thousand words.

We like the house we are staying in more and more with each passing hour.  There is a strange turret on the front-left side, with a diameter of about 4 meters.  This creates a great round sleeping loft upstairs (with amazing ocean views), and a sheepskin-and-throw-pillow reading room downstairs.  It sounds cheesy, but the kids, in particular, love the tower.

We are about a 45-minute drive from any restaurant.  Nick and Rachel, the brother and sister who run LifeTime rentals (and grew up in this house), are also outstanding chefs.  They cook our meals in their own kitchen, a 3-minute drive from here, and serve them at the dining table here.  Each meal has been truly remarkable.  A typical dinner:  boneless quail in angel-hair pastry with mint couscous; kingfish lightly barbecued with roasted red peppers; baked chicken with mashed potatoes and broccoli; panzanella salad with hand-made croutons and balsamic; lemon muffins with fresh mango and creme fraiche. 

I would make a lousy food writer, but the meals have been amazing.  Nick and Rachel also are incredibly gracious, friendly, and unobtrusive.  They serve the food, and come back an hour later to take away the dishes.  Sort of like elves, but big, friendly, Australian ones.  They have taken a nice house and beautiful setting, and created an exceptional set of experiences for us.

Even aside from the great house, the spectacular views, the pale blue ocean, the wonderful food and service, and the nearly perfect weather, we have had a lot of fun exploring the island.

We had a guide, named Tim Harris, for our first full day.  The Latin name for a Tasmanian Devil is Sarcophilus Harris (Harris’s flesh eater), and Tim says he is a direct descendant of that Harris.  Zola was very impressed by this.  The Devils’ former name, incidentally, was Sarcophilus Satanicus.

The tour with Tim went from 9:30 am to almost 7 pm, which was pretty long, but worthwhile.  We started in a national park, tracking koalas and rare glossy black cockatoos on foot.  Tim told us that the cockatoos’ diet consists exclusively of seed cones from the she-oak tree, always held in their left talons and eaten while rotated counter-clockwise.  This obsessive-compulsive behavior may be part of the reason there are only 300 of these guys left.   Eventually we saw five of the birds (beautiful), and scores of wallabies and kangaroos, but no koalas.

Tim took us for a walk on Stokes Beach, which used to be pretty much inaccessible, blocked by cliffs on both ends.  Several years ago, some Island men went to the north cliff of a Sunday afternoon, bringing along took a bunch of beer and plastic explosives.  They blasted and drank, and drank and blasted, until they created a narrow passage onto the beach through the rocks.  Zola and I both thought this was pretty cool.

Tim grilled us some fish for lunch, and then took us down to the sea lion beach on the island’s south coast.  We found out, incidentally, that sea lions and seals are the same thing.  Australian sea lions are wildly endangered, but there is a big colony on KI.  We walked right down next to where hordes of them were sleeping, in about 25 family groups of 12-15 seals each. 

Apparently, sea lions go out and hunt fish for about 72 hours at a stretch, swimming ~200 kilometers, and making 400-500 dives.  Each dive is about 150 meters deep.  When they come back to the beach, they collapse, as if they have been unplugged, and sleep about 20 hours a day for the following three days.  Then the cycle starts again.

This is a long-winded way of saying that most of what we saw on the beach was sea lions sleeping. 

 That said, the dominant males in each little family group woke up from time to time, to chase females, confront other males, or round up errant pups.  During the hour that we watched, we saw nine or ten sumo-like shoving matches, with loud barking and teeth gnashing.  These are huge animals (600-800 kilograms each), so watching them fight was pretty awesome.  Each skirmish ended quickly, with the non-dominant males wrigglescurrying off to fight another day.  The dominant male would then collapse again and sleep.

On the way back to the north coast, we stopped several times to look for koalas.  We were introduced to a brother and sister, aged 12 and 9, as we searched the eucalyptus trees on their farm for koalas.  Zola nearly died of embarrassment on the spot, a hazard which was not on the list communicated by Vickie the rental-car lady.  We did not see koalas in any of these spots, but we did see a few huge wedge-tailed eagles, flapping their meter-long wings menacingly as they hunted for wallabies to swoop down and kill.

Finally, just before we got back to our house, we found three koalas sleeping peacefully (as they do 20 hours per day) in trees next to the road.  Mission accomplished!

Rachel and her mother, Belinda, who owned a famous restaurant in Adelaide for many years, served us a spectacular dinner in an corrugated old sheep-shearing shed on their property.  The shed has been fixed up, and decorated so stylishly that India took careful notes and asked many questions.  Before dessert we went outside for a family game of candlelight croquet.  No lanterns got broken, and Zola and Tallulah each believe that they won, so we counted that as success.

As Rachel was taking us back to our house, she said, “You’ve got to see this,” and veered her 4×4 off the driveway and down into a big pasture.  Good, old-fashioned redneck fun.  Scores, maybe hundreds, of kangaroos hopped away from Rachel’s headlights as she drove slowly amongst them.  Zola and Tallulah thought this was the best thing yet.