Kangaroo Island: Snake and Seal Bay

Our latest adventure was an overnight trip to Kangaroo Island - Australia's third largest island.

The island is 155km wide and home to 4400 people, but for the most part it is unspoiled wilderness and national parks.  For the first time, I actually felt like I was in Australia.

Because the trip was so great I have lots to tell, so I will be post an entry for each attraction instead of each day.  That way I won't feel bad about making the entries too long and leaving out great pictures!

Our trip started at 5am on Monday.  We had a 2 hour bus ride from downtown Adelaide to Cape Jarvis, a 45 minute ferry ride to Penneshaw, and then we picked up our rental car on the island.  All of the pre-packaged, 2-day tours had the overnight stay in Penneshaw, but that didn't make any sense to me so I booked our night at the only "hotel" on the west side of the island (point A on map).  This meant that we only had to drive one way the first day, then home the second day.  The tours also stopped in many places we didn't care about (the honey farm, lavender farm, sheep milking, eucalyptus distillery, bird of prey demonstration, and pelican feeding) which is why we decided to do a self-drive tour.

On our way to our first attraction, Seal Bay, we had to drive on a red dirt road.  We're driving along and I see what I think is a stick so I plan to run it over, but as I approach it I realize it's a black snake!  If you remember back to Ryan's post awhile ago, he warned never to drive over snakes or they coil around your wheel and eventually work their way into your car.  Luckily I missed it and we quickly tried to reverse to see what it was.  Turns out there are only two kinds of snakes on KI, and we're pretty sure we saw the tiger snake.  They weren't due to wake up from their hibernation yet, but lucky us they are early this year.  So we saw our first Australian snake!

Picture from Wikipedia - we didn't get a picture

The one we saw was all black, but the patterns vary greatly from snake to snake.   It was probably just over a metre long.  As usual, it is venomous and potentially lethal if a bite is untreated.

Moving on...we did eventually get to Seal Bay!  We had a nice picnic lunch overlooking the ocean and the sea lions lying on the beach.  After lunch we did a guided tour where we actually walked on the beach with the sea lions.  This particular kind, the Australian sea lion, is very endangered and we saw the last remaining colony in the world.  As the guide pointed out "there are less Australian Sea Lions than polar bears."  It was actually a very fun experience, and even more special for Ryan since he hasn't seen sea lions up close before.  It didn't hurt that the beach was beautiful!  Enjoy the pictures and play "count the sea lions"; they're really hard to spot sometimes!

Our standard picnic lunch: bread, cheese, and a new addition of "spiced pear spread"

View from picnic spot

A little closer, same area of the beach.  Can you count the sea lions now?

These guys were sleeping up in the bushes and waddled down so we had to get out of their way.