2015/11 Australia trip - Flinders Chase |
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After coffee in the hidden away Seal Bay café, we headed to Flinders Chase park. This park was excluded for some reason from our South Australia pass, and we’d also read that booking of campsites was “essential”. Not so. We had our pick of three campgrounds and opted for Snake Lagoon, off down a gravel road.
To our surprise the park has platypus, also recently introduced. We walked to the platypus ponds but we didn’t see any, not surprising at midday; they are usually active at dusk and dawn. Then we were off down the road to Cape du Couedic to see two of the park’s iconic sights, Admiral’s Arch and the Remarkable Rocks.
Boardwalks took us from the lighthouse down to Admiral’s Arch with its fur seal colony. The arch is quite a sight and the seals were fun to watch, 
splashing around in the rock pools. It’s an even better experience if you can see it without a couple of busloads of people crushing you against the railings!
From there we also had a distant view of the Remarkable Rocks looking like castle ruins on the tip of Kirkpatrick Point. We drove around the bay for a closer look and were surprised to find we had the place to ourselves. The rocks truly are 
remarkable examples of granitic erosion, similar to many of the other rocks we’d encountered elsewhere but with a magnificent setting above the sea.
On our own, we had plenty of opportunity to take silly pictures of ourselves amongst the rocks
. The only downside of having the rocks to ourselves was that we had no one to share the flies with.
There were of course some flowers to be seen on Kangaroo Island, though not as many as we’d
seen in Western Australia. I’d promised Sandie there’d be flower pictures in this letter, so here they are:
We went back to the platypus ponds and saw enough ripples and bubbles to be convinced that there were some things swimming around down there 
but the water was so dark with tannin that we couldn’t tell if they were platypus or turtles.
We had a nice secluded campsite at Snake Lagoon. The lagoon had no water in it and no obvious snakes either.
Tuesday November 17th
We had to make our way across the island to be ready for our ferry next morning. We stopped one last time by the platypus pools: not even a ripple. Then we were 
heading north on a good gravel road across the Ravine des Casoars wilderness area. It presumably was named by someone who thought the emus were 
cassowaries. The road deteriorated to washboard when we took the turn to Cape Borde.
We thought the lighthouse complex was unmanned when we arrived but then the rangers appeared with a horde of schoolkids on a field trip. The museum of lighthouse equipment was interesting. We started the trail down to the clifftop but eventually gave up when it turned to heavily stepped limestone.
Instead we drove to Scott Point for a really nice view of the coastline.
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