23rd of March 2008

I left Adelaide early Friday morning heading southwest, its always such a mess trying to get out of the cities. But after a couple of buses to get to the outer suburbs and a couple of cars thereafter I came to the ferry leaving for Kangaroo Island. Went over and stayed the night at the backpackers in Kingscote.
Kangaroo Island is the third biggest island of Australia with 540km of coastline. Its been spared from european diseases and feral species like foxes and dingoes and therefore has an abundant population of wildlife, or used to anyway. In December last year a dry thunderstorm passed the island striking in 14 different places creating huge bushfires. 96% of Flinders Chase, the main national park, ended up being burnt down killing the majority of the animals and a a fifth of the whole island ended up burned. They still thrive on their tourism though and the animals are still out there but the national park has been closed while nature recovers. Hitchhiking on a island like this with mainly dirt roads and mostly australian family's there for easter is not the easiest of things. I was stuck by one beach the first day for over 6 hours, but being lucky and catching 3 different rides just before dark I ended up where I wanted to go that day pitching my tent for the first time and sharing a couple of beers with 2 german guys and one italian. It was freezing cold, so not a very good start for the tent and sleeping bag.
The second day was much better, after the germans dropped me almost immediately 3 chinese picked me up and they were going to just about all the places I wanted to go that day and I came back to Kingscote already 5PM.
Despite the fire I ended up seeing kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, goannas, possums, fur seals, penguins and pelicans and alot of beautiful beaches and countryside, so in overall a good visit to the island.
Tomorrow morning I'm taking the ferry back to the mainland and will starting hitching my way towards Melbourne along the Great Ocean Road.

PS. Its really hard to not put up more photos, got so many nice ones but don't want to flood the blog with photos of incredible beaches, landscape views and people I run into and so on.. DS.