Attack of the Killer Drop Bears

(karen)
We were lured by glossy advertisements promising copious native flora and fauna into booking a trip to Kangaroo Island, just off the coast of South Australia. Honestly, they had us thinking that we'd be picking echidnas out of out hair and shaking platypus out of our boots. Who could resist such a temptation? So off to the YHA travel agent to make a booking, where we realized that a return trip on the ferry with our car would cost $300. You can imagine our sticker shock that a podunk 45 minute ferry ride would cost $300, when we paid less than that for a three hour trip between islands in New Zealand. Apparently there's a little thing called "capitalism", which holds that any business without competition can charge whatever they damn well feel like.


We departed Cape Jervis early in the morning and arrived without incident on Kangaroo Island. Immediately we hopped on the dusty backroads and started exploring. Most of the central and eastern regions of the island have been converted to farmland, so we spotted a multitude of sheep and cows but as of yet no marsupials. Our first stop was at Clifford's Honey Farm where (get this) there resides the last pure strain of Ligurian bees on the planet. Incredible, I know. For a mere $2 each we got to watch an educational video on the honey gathering process and observe an active hive through plexiglass windows. The samples of their gum tree honey in the gift shop were pretty tasty though, as was the honey icecream.


As we made our way toward the western edge of the island there was less farmland and more native bush. We rubbed our hands greedily, let the wildlife onslaught ensue! In the Flinders Chase National Park we spotted a few roos hopping around the roadsides, but the echidna mating trains we were promised were MIA. Our trip to the platypus pools yielded nothing but one or two ripples across the dark waters (no doubt fish related). Shaking out my boots yeilded similarly poor results. The absolute highlight of the trip, however, was our visit to the Koala (aka drop bear) Sanctuary. In a span of only 600 meters we counted 23 koalas snuggled tightly into adorable little koala balls, high in the eucalptus canopy.**


Just as we were about to leave one of the koalas picked up his head, looked around, and gave a big sleeeepy yawn. How amazing to have seen one awake, we exclaimed! But then our sleepy koala stood up on his branch and proceeded to walk over to the tree trunk and climb his way down to the ground. At the base of the tree he glanced around and then took off in a bow-legged hopping run, kind of like a rabbit. You'd never guess it but those suckers can really move when they're inclined! He passed right in front of me and for a split second I panicked that he'd try to climb my leg like a gum tree. Lucky for me he kept running until he found a tree he liked. He bounded up a few feet, dug in his sharp black claws, and perched there for a minute assessing his situation. Apparently this tree was inadequate, so he jumped back to the ground. He did this several times, running to a new tree, climbing a couple of feet and looking around, then jumping down to try the next one. We were surprised that when he finally found "the one" it was a large pine tree! He climbed into the upper branches and immediately we started to hear a low, menacing growl. After a quick search we saw that there was already a well established koala who wasn't keen to share with this feisty newcomer. The growling continued until it became clear that that was the limit of the energy he was willing to expend during this invasion. The forest grew quiet and the two koalas hunkered down for a 22 hour nap.



In conclusion, despite our koala encounter, Kangaroo Island was interesting to visit but not worth the exorbitant price tag. For a more pristine environment with truly abundant wildlife viewing we would highly recommend visiting Wilson's Promontory in Victoria. More on that next time, stay tuned!



**The fact that there are in total 27,000 koalas on a small corner of the island points to larger issues of population mismanagement, though the Parks Service are attempting to rectify the situation through sterilization and and relocation. It should be noted that the animals are not native, they were introduced during the last century.