Day 20 (Kangaroo Island): Today we drove down to Port Jervis, to catch the Sea Link ferry to Kangaroo Island. This island is off the coast of SA. The ferry takes about 30 minutes to make the crossing. It is fun to stand on the ferry deck and look for dolphins, although we didn't see any. Luckily, the weather was good and it wasn't too choppy because Eve says she always throws up on that ferry. That didn't happen either. The ferry is a car and passenger ferry, so we brought Pete's car, Longman, with us. Once we arrived, aruond 4:45pm, we went to the grocery store to get some food. Then we headed over to American River, which is where Eve's uncle Jim lives. Uncle Jim was kind enough to let us stay with him while we were on the island. When we arrived, Uncle Jim and his mate, Noel, were heading out to do some fishing, so we went with them. It's a short walk from UJ's house to the docks. We used cockles for bait, and fished from there. The disappointing news is that neither Eve nor I caught anything useful. Eve caught a crab with her line, the same crab twice, actually. And I had a lot of nibbles but no bites. On the next dock over little children were reeling the fish in like no tomorrow. It was a little depressing, but the night was so nice, and we watched the sun set, and a dolphin chasing fish over in the shallows, that I couldn't complain. It was beautiful, and so relaxing. Noel caught three fish that were large enough to keep, and combined with some that he and UJ had caught earlier, we had a delicious feast of fish for tea. Eve made chips in the oven and we steamed some broccoli while UJ fried up the catch. Yum!
Off to explore the island today. I decided what our activities for today should be, so we headed along the north shore of the island to a beach called Stokes Bay. To get to the beach, you had to walk through some slab caves - way cool. Here's a view of the beach through the walls of the cave. We had the beach almost to ourselves. The water was beautiful, and we enjoyed swimming and laying on the sand underneath our trusty Eukanuba beach umbrella. After a few hours at this beach, we drove farther along the coast to check out Western Bay Inlet, another cool beach. The color of the water here was beautiful. I thought it looked like something from Peter Pan: cliffs on one side of the beach, and a small lagoon (for the mermaids) on the other, with greenish blue water in between. The swimming was good here, too, but it was noticeably colder at the bottom of the water than it was at the top.
We left the beach and drove like mad women to get to the island honey farm about 10 minutes before they closed. There we bought some homemade honey ice cream (yum!) and chocolate covered honeycomb. Delicious!
Back at Uncle Jim's, we made dinner and Eve taught me how to play canasta. Then the three of us played two hands and I won one of them! In the end Eve won and I was second. UJ was third.
Day 22: Today we tackled the south coast. First we visited an adventure shop and hired a sandboard, but it was very hot so we decided to leave sandboarding (sliding down the sand dunes) at a place called Little Sahara for the next day. On our way south, we passed a koala walk, so we turned in to check it out. There was an honesty box asking for $2.50 each to explore this area where koalas tend to hang out. We had spent most of our cash so we didn't have the money to go in. So we raided the car, knowing that Eve is something of a change hoarder. In total we found $15 in change buried under floormats, down the seats, and squirreled away in various locations in our bags that were in the car. So we were now set. We walked around the koala walk for a few minutes and saw 7 or 8 koalas, just chilling and sleeping in the trees. We also saw a wallaby, some kangaroos and a cool parrot, which was eating from a bird feeder. Eve startled the parrot and it flew up and flicked bird seed down her shirt and in her face!
At the extreme southern end of the island is a national park called Flinders Chase. There we saw Remarkable Rocks, a bunch of large rock formations with remarkable shapes, and Admiral's Arch, with lots of seals lying around the arch, too.
We watched the sun set through the arch and enjoyed the antics of the fur seals that were lying all around. Then it was back to Uncle Jim's for the night.
Day 23: Today we headed to Little Sahara, an area of massive sand dunes, and rode our sandboard down the dunes. Neither of us were particularly good at it, and it's not really that much like snowboarding because you can't really turn - you just go straight down, and, if you're Eve, you go straight down while screaming! We had the dunes all to ourselves for a couple of hours, which was great since we weren't very good at sand sliding. In the end we sat on our sandboard like a tobaggan and rode it down.
We also visited the Island Pure Dairy, which makes cheeses from sheep's milk. We watched the sheep being milked and tasted delicious cheeses and yogurt. It was really yummy. This evening we headed back to the mainland on the ferry. I really enjoyed Kangaroo Island - it's beautiful. Now official "holidays" are over! (for Eve anyway)
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