Festival City and (No) Kangaroo Island

The civil engineers who designed the road between Horsham and Adelaide must have known that the scenery, flat and almost empty for miles on end, might render drivers catatonic. Interspersed with the place names (Dimboola, Gerung Gerung, Kiata, Nhill, Tintinara, Culburra, Coonalpyn, Coomandook) and signs alerting you to “mountains” you might otherwise miss, including Mt. Zero,  elevation 340 meters, were billboards with dire warnings: Fatigue is Fatal, Survive This Drive, Take a Break, and my favorite, the alliterative Drowsy Drivers Die. Despite the long flight and time difference, Bill was kept alert by the challenge of trying to remember to stay on the correct side of the road (and by panicked reminders by Ailie and me) as we made our way to Adelaide.

Adelaide was supposed to be a stopover on the trip, a place to rest after the drive and to collect Cyril from the airport the next day. It turned out to be the highlight of my stay in Oz this time around. 

The city was alive with concurrent festivals, and in our short stay we lucked into a free concert on the river to ring in the Fringe Festival, the opening day of the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, and a talk by one of my favorite authors at the inaugural day of the 2014 Adelaide Writer’s Festival. If we’d been so inclined we could also have joined the thousands of people heading toward the Clipsal V8 races in the east end of Adelaide – but we didn’t need to, since we could hear the strange buzzing sound of the racecars, like an armada of megamozzies, from across the city.

After a few last minute purchases (dark chocolate passion-fruit cremes from Haigh’s for me, some flash new boots for Ailie, shorts and a t-shirt for Bill, who had forgotten that he was coming to southern hemispheric summer when he packed) we headed south to Cape Jervis to catch the Kangaroo Island ferry. The KI to-do list was short: relax, do some beach hopping and see and photograph enough wallabies and kangaroos to be able compare and tell the difference between them. Two out of three’s not bad.

Our house in the trees was comfortable and laid-back. The beaches were many, varied, and luxuriously empty.

 But the wildlife (except for the unfortunate roadkill roos and possums grotesquely lying feet up on the verges) never emerged from the bush in our presence -- I guess, like any island local toward the end of tourist season, they were sooooo over us. And so it passed that the kangaroos I photographed on Kangaroo island where those pressed into bricks or fashioned into mosaics near the ferry terminal. Or were they wallabies?

We did see what seemed like a small city of NZ fur seals in Flinders Chase National Park, and Bill claimed the wildlife-spotting prize for pointing out the koalas hanging out in the gum trees behind the visitor’s center. I expressed a little skepticism as I wondered how recently Disney had installed these particularly lifelike Koalanimatrons, and wondered how hard it could have been to include some wallabybots while they were at it.