Kangaroo Island

Ros arrived late but safely on Tuesday and we wandered through central Adelaide on Wednesday - to the impressive museum with its displays of aboriginal culture and beautiful fossils preserved in opal (and a roaring Tyrannosaurus, just to scare the kids, including us!), then on to the lovely Botanical Garden....

We got here yesterday, 100 km southwards from Adelaide down the Fleurieu Peninsula, thru lovely small towns like Myponga (Aboriginal for "Place of high cliffs", but Ros thought the sign saying "Myponga plumbing" was pretty funny...) and Yankalilla, to Cape Jervis to then take a 45 minute ride on the big Sealink catamaran to Penneshaw on the northeastern tip of KI - which is big, 160 km long and up to 55 km wide, with only 4,400 inhabitants. Lots of wild heath, scrub and foorestland, some farming and vineyards, but most of all it's a nature preserve (separated from the mainland since the last ice age 10,000 years ago) for all the remaining original wild animals of Australia - kangaroo, wallabies, possums, koalas, you name it.... We drove 150 km to the westernmost part of the island and as the sun set were surrounded by grazing kangas and wallabies, some of whom clearly wanted to share our supper....

Then today into the Flinders Chase National Park, with its spectacular "Remarkable Rocks" (geologically to be classified as "bloody big boulders", sculpted by nature over millions of years and very reminiscent of Henry Moore, but see the 2 tiny people for scale!) and the Admiral's Arch, an equally impressive limestone archway, with the rocks below littered with hundreds of basking fur seals. Finally saw our first koalas in the wild, but tonight's planned sunset walk to see more put off because of yet more rain showers