Kangaroo Island, Day 1

Awoke at 5:30am, although neither of us were really awake. We caught our shuttle van at 6:20, in the darkness of the morning. Aren't we supposed to be catching up on sleep during our vacation? After catching the coach, we watched the sunrise as we completed our 90 minute ride from Adelaide to the port to catch our ferry. Steven slept a little, Stephanie not so much. The ferry was only about 45 minutes but involved a lot of motion, much more than our cruise ship. After arriving at the port on Kangaroo Island, our tour bus was ready and waiting for us – we lucked out because our bus was only half-full while others were packed. We were a little surprised at how large the island actually is…our tour guide, Alex, informed us it takes approximately 2 hours to travel across from one end of the island to the other. We were going to cover a good portion of it in our two days on the island.

Our first stop was a honey farm - we learned about how a particular Italian queen bee, the best species in the world, was brought over to KI because the island could preserve this strain from infection and cross-breeding with other honey bees. They export these particular queen bees all over the world because of the quality of their breeding. A few other interesting facts:

- there are over 3,000 hives on the island
- 80,000 bees are in one hive
- Worker bees are all female and they only live for about 6 weeks; the male bees just relax

We enjoyed some homemade honey ice cream and boarded the bus once again.

We had a nice lunch of fish and chips after the honey farm and went to the Parndana Wildlife Park to see some native animals, and more kangaroos, so Stephanie was quite happy. And, unlike the park at Tasmania, these ‘roos were happy to see people and be fed. Along with the usual Australian fare of kangaroos, wallabies, and koalas, we saw a baby freshwater crocodile, plenty of cockatoos, we were even lucky to hold a baby kangaroo. We were also lucky to see a mom with her joey, although he (or she) was shy and didn't want to come out and play.

Off to see more wildlife, Seal Bay was our next stop. Australian Sealions are endangered and this area is really preserved to make sure the sealions are not disturbed and can carry on with their normal breeding activities – or sun-bathing as most of these were. They swim for three straight days and nights looking for food so this is their opportunity to sleep and feed their pups.

Our tour day ended with a pelican feeding…they are pretty smart animals. They were already lined up at 4:45pm, just waiting for the guy with the red bucket to walk down the rocks and give them some food. And before he could even pull out a fish, they were already snapping at his hands and arms. Some seagulls were also able to grab a snack when the pelicans weren’t paying attention.

We checked into our hotel for the night and walked down the street for some of the most amazing pizza we’ve ever eaten – we can say this now because we haven’t been to Italy yet. Grabbed a bottle of wine from the bottle shop and we had ourselves a very nice dinner and decent view from the hotel patio area. Life doesn’t get much better than this!

Every night at 8:30pm and 9:30pm, there are tour guides who take people down to the beach to look for Little Penguins – that’s exactly what they are called because, at adulthood, they will only weigh 1 kilogram. We were told they saw 3 penguins the previous night and we did only see three that night. We were also informed that, during high season, they have seen as many as 60, which is probably quite a sight to see. No flash photography was allowed as it can ruin the penguin’s eyes and we were lead down the path with a red flashlight since penguins apparently cannot see the color red. Although the penguins were fun to see, we seemed to be more impressed with the amount of stars – it was a perfectly clear night, none of the smog/fog/clouds/city lights we are used to in Southern California. The Milky Way was so impressive it reminded us of pictures we’ve seen in our science textbooks. Our pictures didn't turn out too well with the red light and no flash, so you'll just have to take our word for it.