Rainbow after a storm
Jo arranged a trip to Kangaroo Island, just off the South Australia coast, a two hour drive and 45 minute ferry trip from Adelaide. For Jo, it was a chance to do a lot of longer distance driving, and her first ever trip as The Driver. There was lots of driving every day because Kangaroo Island is quite large. It took us two hours to get from one end to the other on the sealed roads. We hoped to avoid the dirt roads in the Blitz Buggy, a 25 year old Colt, and selected our inland explorations carefully.
Kangaroo Island was the first white-settled part of South Australia with a ship landing in July 1837. The ruins of the first settlement are now a park at Kingscote. We wandered through the cemetery and Jo picked out the names that are still common locally.
There are numerous nature reserves and natural parks. We visited a rock formation that is similar in geology to Uluru, but fractured and weathered from sitting on the edge of a seaside cliff. It is called Remarkable Rocks and they are.
KI is good farming land and there is a sheep dairy called Island Pure that makes delicious sheep milk cheeses. We also dug into the island’s fresh water crayfish called marron, the local Ligurian honey, and free range eggs. And we enjoyed the local wines, which I tasted and selected at the cellar doors, as Jo is allowed zero blood alcohol in her first two years of driving.
The weather was surprisingly clear and beautiful, though chilly. Three of four nights we stargazed - the lights of Adelaide were a dim orange glow in the distance that couldn’t match the bright white glow of the Milky Way. The southern hemisphere Milky Way is fractured and branching and so very full of stars. I was happy.
On the last day, it rained like mad off and on through the whole day but every time we got out of the car to look at the sights, the sky cleared for a little while. We even had a hailstorm but we were sheltered at eating lunch at Kingscote when it happened.
And after each rain, the rainbows came. I saw four yesterday and one the day before. Almost like Ireland.
We saw a lot of what the island had to offer, but there were still places that we missed this time and I am looking forward to returning to see them someday. There are some photos up on Flickr if you’d like to see the highlights.
Posted by kuri at July 08, 2008 10:44 AM