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Flinders Chase National Park, Australia
Wrap her up in a package of lies, send her off to a coconut island
If you don't count the six hour stopover at the surprisingly nice Kuala Lumpur Airport, the much briefer stopover in Melbourne as well as the full day and night I spent at the wonderfully pleasant though thoroughly unspectacular South Australia city of Adelaide, the first place I visited after Bangkok (and the first place since London where it was safe to drink the water) was here, Kangaroo Island. Home to seventeen national parks and reserves and just about every type of wacky Australian animal around, it is without doubt the best place to see where the wild things are. This is one of the island's natural phenomena, Admiral's Arch, the showcase of Flinders Chase National Park and home to a large and sleepy colony of New Zealand fur seals.
Often you get the feeling that they were really running out of names by the time they got to Australia. If it wasn't given a goofy name like Woolloomooloo or Wallaby or named after a woman like Olga, Alice or Adelaide, it was usually given an obvious, uncreative name like here. These are the Remarkable Rocks, still in Flinders Chase National Park, as unnatural looking as natural phenomena can get.
Despite the almost condescending name reminiscent of a children's television show, Kangaroo Island does have its payoffs. Home to tiny, unintendedly nocturnal fairy penguins, kangaroos, koalas, Australian sea lions, New Zealand fur seals, platypuses and many a wacky bird; I was fortunate enough to see them all in my short visit with the exception of the tiny, elusive platypus. This is a surprised wallaby, smaller than his unlucky-crossing-the-road kangaroo cousin.
Australian sea lions, sharing a beach with small, park ranger led groups including me at one point. As long as you kept three meters away there would be no (real) trouble from the sea lions, who didn't seem to have that same rule as they would surf in from the sea, often headed right after some panicked park-goer.
Just a standard clearing, as birds (or, as I refer to them, wacky ass geese) graze the grasslands.
The koala population outnumbers the human population three to one on Kangaroo Island, and most look pretty much like this. Small gray furry lumps in eucalyptus trees, sleeping twenty of every twenty four hours (see Page 3 for closer pictures of sleepy koalas) saving their energy for, well, not that much actually.
Kangaroo Island is, after all, an island. It’s not that far off the southern coast of Australia and only a quick bus ride and ferry ride away from Adelaide. The water that you’re looking at looks like any other ocean but gets hard to define. It’s either the Great Australian Bight (a giant bay that covers that bottom indentation in Australia) or the Indian Ocean (which stretches all the way west to India) or the Southern Ocean (which stretches straight on to Antarctica). It all depends on who you ask.
