Day 10: Kangaroo Island

Day 10: Kangaroo Island

Saturday 19^th February

There was the most beautiful sunrise this morning and we could view its early progress right from our bed. A glorious morning evolved with sunshine and no wind making ideal, and rather novel, conditions for Mark’s bike ride and for my walk. I headed north first off, along the beach-front promenade, and then back out to Granite Island greatly enjoying having a beach front path to tread this morning.

We had a substantial day of travel today with an hour trip to Cape Jervis to catch the Ferry for the 45 minute journey to Kangaroo Island. Our hosts had earlier suggested to us to explore the eastern part of the island before heading to our accommodation at Kingscote, located on the northern side of the island. They had then said we would be able to dedicate our following, one full day on the island exploring the rugged southern and western national park area.

The Ferry arrived in to Kangaroo Island just before 1 pm. It’s at this point I think I should warn all Vodafone uses, like ourselves. There is very little Vodafone reception here at all in fact it’s non-existent. So we had to revert to using the cars sat-nav system to get us around that island. We did a loop out to the Willoughby Lighthouse before heading to our villa. In hindsight, the hour trip out and back to the Lighthouse probably wasn’t worth it because there wasn’t that much scenery to see on the way. The road is unsealed for the most and set to a 50 km limit and basically passes just through grazing land.

One thing I did notice as we drove around was the abundance of limestone outcrops across the island. We’d also seen mention of a few vineyards on the promotional material on the ferry on the way over. So I put 2 and 2 together: My favourite wines come from an area of New Zealand where there’s lots of limestone and, so, maybe the wineries here might have some nice wines?

We got to our accommodation at Villas on the Bay Kingscote at about 3 pm and were pleasantly surprised to find lovely accommodation. Our host mentioned that our Villa, Villa 9, was the only one on the complex where you can lie in bed and see the ocean. We would add to that it’s probably the only Villa where you can sit on the toilet and see the ocean as well. Our hosts, Bryan and Denise, had generously provided a well stocked kitchen with milk, a variety of cereals, a beautiful loaf of home-made style bread, butter, jams honey and Vegemite.

There were no set plans for our first afternoon in Kingscote as we hadn’t been sure about our arrival time. On our drive into Kingscote we noticed there were quite a few vineyards in the area and so after settling into the villa we headed out to one, the Bay of Shoals, that was just five minutes up the road from our accommodation. This was a lovely vineyard with views out over the water and a few nice wines, a 6 pack is now on its way to our house in Bondi!

Dinner was initially booked for 6.45 pm, at Amadios Vino e Cucina, but we brought it forward to 6.15 pm as we were pretty tired after our big day of navigation. We headed down to the local pub, The Ozone Hotel, for a pre-dinner drink before heading to the restaurant.

We got down to the Ozone Hotel just before 6 pm and it was filling up fast. The horse races had been on just nearby and clearly this was the destination for all the after race dinner and drinks catch-ups: there were lots of guys in chinos and RMs. The hotel is located right on the water and has spectacular views from the bistro and the main bar. We decided that we would come back here tomorrow night for dinner.

It turns out we arrived just before all the buses dropped the race goers back to Kingscote for dinner and drinks. We also found out that it had been the Kangaroo Cup today, the annual big race event. There was a steady parade of drunks and fascinators emerging from the stream of buses, all visible from our table whilst we ate dinner! Aside from all this entertainment, our meal at Amadios was delicious and I’d highly recommend this place if you’re ever in the area.

We’d had a big day of travel and another planned for tomorrow with sightseeing around the rest of the island and so it was back to base for an early night.