Rain and wind blowing at a maddening 140 km / h had turned the Gulf of St. Vincent off the coast of South Australia into a mess of white-tipped breakers and lashing sea foam. When the Sealink vehicle ferry at Cape Jervis attempts to depart, its hull hits the jetty and service is suspended indefinitely. And so is my mission to visit Kangaroo Island, a lonely and isolated place considered the Galapagos of Australia for its incredibly rich and unique wildlife.
But he couldn’t wait long. Three months later I find myself back on the Sealink ferry, clutching a paper bag, as waves the size of semitrailers roll under the bow. Fortunately, the wind is blowing at a relatively calm 25km / h and it’s a short drive to the landing point at Penneshaw, the almost comatose port of Kangaroo Island. With rows of beach huts overlooking a bone-white beach where little penguins come out to play at night in the bluest waters on this side of Tahiti, Penneshaw is everything some vacationers see of KI, like the locals tend to call it. But like most of the 140,000 people who visit Australia’s third-largest island each year, my three-day itinerary is packed with wildlife sanctuaries, marine parks, beaches, restaurants, wineries, galleries, and more. Topping the list is Flinders Chase National Park, an open zoo half the size of Singapore, located 150 km west of Penneshaw.
With ice
Flinders Chase offers protection to endemic KI wildlife such as shy short-billed echidnas, boisterous shiny black cockatoos and deadly black tiger snakes, as well as iconic Australian creatures such as the koala and platypus.
There are vast expanses of native bush to find peace and solitude, as well as places to camp, trails to hike, and rivers to explore. But the park’s main attraction is Cape du Couedic, a windswept peninsula.
at the southern tip of the island.
Named for French navigator Nicolas Baudin in 1803, the cape’s jagged cliffs and hammering surf took away the worst of KI’s 80-odd shipwrecks. Among them was Loch Soy, a Scottish schooner that lost 31 of its 34 passengers and crew at sea when it crashed into the rocks in 1899.
The Adelaide newspaper, The Advertiser, reported that surviving sailor William Mitchell said: “I have never seen anything like the sea before, which could not be equaled by Cape Horn or any other coast I have ever been on.” In 1907, more than a century after Baudin searched the cape’s treacherous underwater reefs, the South Australian Marine Board commissioned a 25m high sandstone lighthouse to prevent further loss of life. The Cape du Couedic lighthouse, which rises like a monolith on a rugged and arid promontory, is a testament to the resilience of the early settlers of KI.
Despite the altruistic nature of their work, the caretakers who ran it carried stoic and joyless stocks until the lighthouse was automated in 1957. Fresh food and fuel were delivered only four times a year, shipped from the mainland and they climbed the cliffs with a winch. Flying fox.
A few kilometers east of the battered remains of the fox is a strange geological rock formation called Remarkables. This dome-shaped group of rocks was created 500 million years ago when molten lava rose to the surface. Over time, seawater entered the many cracks and crevices, leaving rings of salt that crystallized and expanded. The remaining shapes resemble the cracked skulls and broken bones of an ancient giant, making Remarkables KI the most photographed place.
Another notable rock is Admiral’s Arch, a seaside amphitheater at the western end of the cape, home to a globally endangered colony of New Zealand fur seals. Prized for their lush skins and the grease used to make fuel, lubricants, and oil, they were hunted to the point of near extinction in the early 1800s. And while the sea lion populations in KI have made a comeback, attempts to rejuvenate Australian sea lions have yet to bear fruit.
The lion’s share
The rarest of all seal species, only 15,000 Australian sea lions remain in the wild today. The largest and most accessible known colony is an hour’s drive east of Cape du Couedic in the Seal Bay Aquatic Reserve, where up to 1,000 of these seemingly lethargic creatures spend their days sleeping on a windy beach. “When people started coming here to see sea lions in the 1950s, they were very la-di-da about it, getting too close and annoying them.
Many people were bitten, ”says Ranger Clarence Kennedy. “What they didn’t understand is that sea lions spend up to three days in a row hunting fish and avoiding sharks in the sea. So when they come in and lie down on the beach, they are exhausted and want to sleep. Would you like someone to come into your room and throw sand at you? Access to the beach today is restricted and visitors must join guided tours that provide the sea lions with a generous buffer zone. However, the rules do not diminish the pleasure of watching a seal pup chase its mother, or two 300 kg males exchanging barks and bites in a turf war. “It’s not about interaction,” Kennedy says. “It’s about looking. And these guys know how to put on a show. “
I spend the night in Kingscote, the largest city in KI, home to half of the island’s 4,200 inhabitants. Perched on a tree-lined headland that divides Shoals Bay and Nepean Bay on the island’s north shore, Kingscote changes from a quiet little town in the morning to a bustling shopping center at noon, then back to its normal state. sleepy before dark. A clerk tells me about a Chinese tourist who once asked a policeman (there are three on the island) if a state of emergency had been declared after leaving his hotel on a Saturday afternoon and seeing that the shops were all closed .
Kingscote has great little restaurants serving surprisingly sophisticated dishes made with seafood caught in the morning and KI’s famous organic produce. With the wind blowing like a gale, I decide to spend the day investigating, starting at Kangaroo Island Spirits on Playford Highway.
“Spirits have been distilled in KI for over 200 years,” says owner John Lark. “The seal hunters were definitely making their own whiskey. In 1860, when it became known that a 500-ton schooner carrying a large quantity of whiskey had wrecked at Snug Cove, half of Kingscote rowed out to collect the bottles. They spent two days partying on the cliffs ”.
Lark uses local botanicals like native juniper, wild fennel, and lemon myrtle to make anise, limoncello, and wild gin. The same philosophy (keep it local, keep it fresh) applies later on at Island Bee Hive. Nothing is added to the bottled honey here, although different varieties are grown by changing what the bees eat.
“We produce flavors like stingy bark, which is smoky, and gum, which has hints of caramel, by placing the hives next to those plants,” says sales assistant Christine Robinson. “We also make a wide range of beeswax products: candles, toothpaste, shampoo, soap, and a natural antibiotic called ‘propolis’ that bees collect from leaves. Nothing is wasted ”.
Glorious food food
KI honey is also used to sweeten tubs of sheep’s milk yogurt at Island Pure Dairy on Gum Nut Creek Road, one of only three commercial sheep dairy farms in Australia.
“There are thousands of dairy sheep farms in Europe,” says owner Justin Harman. “But most attempts to bring dairy sheep breeds here failed; sheep produce 40 percent less milk. We had the same problem in the beginning, but after 20 years of finding which breeds perform best, we are now getting comparable results. ”
In addition to sheep’s yogurt and spicy lamb chorizo, Harman makes a selection of sheep’s cheeses: Kefalotiri, a smooth and creamy cheese from Greece; Manchego, a semi-cured cheese with a mild but round flavor; and Haloumi, a Cypriot cheese eaten hot: fried or roasted with a few drops of lemon.
The relentless wind fades into thin air on my last day and the thermometer reads 36 ° C. I spend it loading through the reefs off the north shore aboard a high-speed inflatable boat. Our guide, Andrew Neighbor of Kangaroo Island Marine Adventures, points out fishing for pelicans, sea eagles, albatrosses, and ospreys in crystal clear waters as we approach Emu Bay for KI’s piece de resistance – a chance to swim with nosed dolphins. bottle. Dolphins are elusive today, although we did come across ghostly stingrays and some harmless bronze whaling sharks.
But Neighbor continues the search, taking us to another bay where towering cliffs 200 m high, the highest on the Australian continent, strip on a beach full of seals. There are no dolphins there either, but the ship’s radar identifies a large school of wild Australian salmon just below us.
I cast a fishing line and within seconds hook a 4kg fighting salmon that performs a series of impressive maneuvers in an attempt to dislodge the hook. He manages to escape, although I successfully bring another one a few minutes later.
The emotion is superb but it is a bucket compared to what I experience half an hour later when a pair of dolphins swim to greet me.
Being careful not to splash, I get into the water and swim with these incredibly agile creatures. I always thought dolphins were small, but they are almost 3m long. “The reason we interact so well with them is because the minimum
boat traffic and interference here, ”says Neighbor. “We don’t alter their daily routines, so for now they accept us.”