Adelaide and Kangaroo Island

Winter break has begun, and I just started my two weeks of travelling. I flew out of Brisbane on a 7AM flight to Adelaide, was very lucky and got a very motivated friend to wake up at 5 and give me a ride there. I got into Adelaide and met up with my freshman year roommate Shannon a few hours later, it was really awesome to get to see someone from home. We mostly walked around just killing time that afternoon, and then went back to hang out with people at our hostel and discovered that it was a very strange place. It was a bit removed from the Adelaide CBD and a lot of people seemed to be mentally unstable that were staying there (or many were living there permanently - we saw people leaving in suits to go to work). The woman that checked me in that morning seemed normal at the time, but later revealed herself to be a joint smoking, mural painting, rambling woman that was supposedly needing to be on some sort of mood medication but decided she was not going to take it. We were all sitting outside on the patio of this place, and she announced to the whole group of hostel people that she was off her period. It was funny, yet awkward. Another guy kept nervously pacing throughout the whole place, and would occasionally come outside and say something like, "What a nice little piggy!" and then go back in the hostel. He asked for a cigarette once, and when nobody had one, he freaked out. One girl told me he was on heroin or something. Some other people there were a guy from northern Ireland who was impossible to understand that had impregnated a black girl that was also living there (I guess they were having the kid too, she was 6 months pregnant. I really hope they move out of that place, I can't imagine a kid having to grow up there, it would be a messed up childhood for sure), a kid from New Zealand that looked a lot like the Irish guy and tried to tell people they were brothers, and a middle aged Asian guy that came outside to smoke every 15 minutes and filled all the bookshelfs with manga books (like a lot of manga, like over a hundred books I would guess). It was an interesting group, I felt like I was in a movie where people end up at a hotel or some place where everyone is just twisted. It was funny though, and a different hostel experience.

After 2 nights at Adelaide Backpackers, we went on a trip to Kangaroo Island. It was awesome. Our guide picked us up and we went and saw some cool places on the way out of Adelaide before catching the ferry over to KI. There was a really neat hill we drove to that people go to look for whales, we didn't see any whales, but the views were amazing, and it was just a really peaceful place. There were some cool rocks to climb on too, and we hung out there for awhile. We did a lot of really cool stuff on the island. There was so much wildlife there! In the 2 and a half days we were there, we saw koalas, kangaroos, echidnas, penguins, australian sea lions, new zealand fur seals, wallabies, and lots of sheep. Not only did you get to see these animals, you got to see tons of them really close up. The two places we went to go see the seals had hundreds of them, and you are only a meter or two away at some points. The kangaroos are everywhere, and one that was hanging around one of the picnic sites (it had a baby in its pouch too) even let us come up and pet it. The farm we were staying at had two koalas that lived in the trees right outside our building. It was crazy how many animals there were. We also went on a couple hikes, went sandboarding on these dunes called the Little Sahara, and visited these rock formations known as the Remarkable Rocks. They were quite remarkable. Another cool thing I found out about the island is that the air you breathe there is the cleanest of any place other than Antarctica (according to the guide at the sea lion beach). It definitely was very fresh air. It was neat visiting in wintertime also, it is definitely off-peak and there are hardly any other tourists there. We had most of the areas to ourselves wherever we went, and apparently this is definitely not the case in warmer months. Our guide said that the island just seems more wild this time of the year, and that it is definitely a different experience than if you were to come in the summer when it is busier and less stormy out on the ocean. At one of the hikes we went on, we hung out at these cliffs over the water for a long time just watching the waves. They were probably the biggest waves I'd ever seen in person, at least 5 meters high, and they would even splash water up where we were on the cliffs. It was really an awesome thing to see.

Our group for this tour was pretty sweet. Everyone was stoked to do the activities and pretty outdoors oriented people. There was a Swiss-German girl that was in Australia to learn English, 2 British guys, and a crazy Austrailan guy that was pretty amusing. He was about 50 I would say, but acted like a six year old. He was obsessed with the plant life on the island, and would touch every plant we went by. He apparently used to work for an animal trainer and told us that kangaroos are really hard to train because they will never bond to people, and that they are like sheep in that they don't care at all about humans, even if you bottle feed them and raise them from birth. He was just sortof a goofy guy, and had random things to say at just about every time of the day. Our guide was an Australian named Hamish, and he was really cool. He drove us around in these mini-buses on mostly dirt roads, and we were always blasting some sort of music that would bring me back to jr. high school (crazytown anyone?) while driving through the island. He had a really diverse iPod for sure (Elton John, Michael Jackson, Kanye West...), we even listened to Chris Rock for awhile, it was awesome. The first night on the island he hit a wallaby, and we gave him a lot of shit for it the rest of the time.

We got back into Adelaide at about 8PM on a Thursday, and I went running and Shannon told me I was crazy, and then we went out to a bar with her friend that lives in Adelaide. It was a fun night, we met some crazy people and had an adventure trying to find our way back to the hostel we were staying at. We chose really out of the way hostels, but at least the new one (Backpackers OZ) is normal and does not have any obviously mental people around.


Photos are: kangaroos hanging out in the parking lot at the visitor center, the hill with the awesome view and rocks outside of Adelaide, spooning sea lions, baby sea lion, Shannon and I sandboarding the little Sahara with turbans, baby New Zealand fur seals, and the kangaroo with a joey in her pouch that was begging for food at a picnic site.