Little Islands & Big Bangs

Although this may seem like one big holiday to many people, it really is a lot harder than we manage to make it look. So, exhausted after a long hot summer, we obviously deserved a holiday and headed off to Kangaroo Island, about 100 miles and a short ferry ride south of Adelaide.

It really is a remarkable place, largely untouched bushland and forest with white sandy beaches, spectacular cliffs and an ocean of pure turquoise. It’s pretty big but with a tiny population so finding only your footprints on the sand of one of the many coves is not unusual.

Similar in many ways to Cornwall, it is a quirky place where everybody waves to each other on the deserted roads and the happy hour at the pub lasts thirty minutes. There is also a graveyard for former lighthouse keepers where one chap who passed away in 1858 has two headstones at opposite corners. He must have found the spiral staircase a challenge.

It also has bitterly cold winds, white knuckle ride dirt roads and every single snake on the island is dangerously venomous. We bumped into a few and fortunately they gave us the benefit of the doubt, even when we nearly trod on them.

Kangaroo Island is renowned for being probably the best place to see much of Australia’s animal life in an environment identical to that which the whalers who first landed on the island would have seen.

Being out of season, we almost had the island to ourselves and had a fantastic time walking along beaches full of seals, climbing over the strangest rock formations and tripping over wallabies, koalas and penguins while parrots and eagles filled the skies. It really is a great place.

As is the way though, it was soon over and it was time to go home again, and very strange it was too, to be heading back to Adelaide to continue the holiday.

On our arrival back in sedate old Adelaide though, we found that an explosion had rocked the centre of the city, wrecking a café, a sports shop and the preferred wine bar of the local politicians. Sadly the owner of the café lost his life in the blast and so can’t explain what he was doing there at 3.00am with 50 litres of kerosene. So the mystery and speculation continues, all of which leaves the whole city a little shocked. These things just don’t happen in Adelaide, it’s not that kind of place.

Away from our little local dramas, the whole country is hooked on the story of two miners trapped 900m below the surface. As I write this, they have been down there 12 days following an earthquake which caused a collapse in their gold mine.

While the rescue teams are getting close to them, it is very slow going and the conditions sound appalling as they scratch at rock five times tougher than set concrete.

There is obviously a lot of public sympathy for these blokes, but it’s not for them being stuck in a tiny hole licking water off the rock; Aussies expect their diggers to put up with the odd hardship. Everyone is more concerned with their battle with the nutritionists who are deciding what they should be eating.

Each and every day they request McDonalds, pizza and beer and each and every day they are given carrot soup and vitamin tablets which is pushed through the little serving hatch they have managed to drill through. We have a new public enemy number one; the bloke denying these heroes a Big Mac. Anyway, hopefully they will be out tomorrow.

On the home front, Mandy is now rat and mouse breeder in chief at the local wildlife park. While she enjoys it, she would rather be working with the wombats, partly because they have more personality but mostly because all the rats and mice end up in with the snakes.

And finally, this week sees the end of an institution in Australian as This Is Your Life is taken off the air. There is nobody left over here to do.

Until next time, hope all is well.

M&W