I can’t believe my week on Kangaroo Island is nearly at a close. Just one more walk to complete the five days trekking, up to Kelly Hill Caves tomorrow from our base at the truly excellent Hanson Bay cabins – www.hansonbay.com.au.
My time on the island started extremely well with a weekend at the Sky House, one of the Lifetime Private Retreats () properties at Snelling Beach, in the north. This is a luxurious and intimate experience of KI, beautiful accommodation with extraordinary views over the coast and some special local food and drink thrown in. My favourite part of the visit was on Sunday evening when owner Nick Hannaford presented some marron (yabby), prawns and barbecued whiting at their taverna on Snelling Beach.
Then I met up with Richard and Holger from Australian Wilderness Adventures (www.australianwildernessadventures.com.au) for my walking tour here on KI. We began benignly, with a short walk to the top of Prospect Hill (514 steps, a schoolboy who was counting claimed) and then a hike beside Murray Lagoon, the island’s bird magnet. Here we saw a stack of Cape Barren geese, black swans, heron, plovers and other birds that twitchers would get excited about.
Our base for the week has been the simple but absolutely delicious cabins here at Hanson Bay. They have everything you need, are situated above a calm turquoise coloured bay where (if you’re game) you can swim in the Southern Ocean and are close to where we’ve been doing our serious walking along the south-west coast of KI.
Oh boy, my body (especially my legs) didn’t know what it was letting itself in for this week. I idly read the itinerary, saw a couple of 15 kilometre days and thought “that’s only twice as long as my favourite walk” and should take no time at all. How wrong I was.
This has been true wilderness trekking. We have been walking along the west coast of the island, largely along scrubby, rocky, cliff-strewn shores that very few venture along in a given year. It’s been hard work but I mean that in the most positive terms possible. We have been along beaches that have rarely seen a human foot, we have bush-bashed until my legs (after I eschewed using gaters) bled from ankle to thigh with branch and grass cuts, we have scaled cliffs and walked over huge granite boulders. All within fifty to a hundred metres of a sometimes translucently turquoise and occasionally growling and tantrum-throwing Southern Ocean. It has been superb and made all the more superb by the magnificent guiding skills of Holger, who, despite skewering his foot on a sharp stick on the second afternoon, has led us with humour, intelligence and great skill along this largely unchartered coast. Business partner Richard Mayne, who is an old chum from a trek through the Flinders two years ago, meanwhile has kept us royally fed here at Hanson Bay using produce from across the island. He’s so good he was just about to audition for Masterchef. He’s even inventive with the scroggin (or doggerel as I misname it) that he sends us off with everyday: this has every energy food known to man – nuts, seeds, M and Ms, dates, chocolate covered liquorice – thrown together in a delirious tizzy. Well done, sir!
So, at the end of the fourth day of walking the magnificent coast of cliffs and caves, bays and boulders, I am a gloriously happy wreck. My legs throb, my face is wind and sun-tanned, I am scratched to buggery (to the great satisfaction of the self-flagellating Englishman that I half am) and I am ready to pronounce this untouched part of Kangaroo Island one of the country’s great wilderness areas. In 45 kilometres of trekking we have seen no other human being other than when we arrived at Admirals Arch yesterday afternoon, where the New Zealand fur seals hang out. We even had the Remarkable rocks to ourselves by making an early start this morning.
I can’t speak highly enough of Australian Wilderness Adventures. It’s a new company with its heart bang in the right place and with some heady ideas for future treks, including an off-trail Kakadu walk that I seriously hope to do. In the meantime they are booking up fast for their Larapinta trek in central Australia, beginning in April next year. I can’t think of better hands in which to find yourself doing any walk but if you are into to getting off the beaten track then this Kangaroo Island trek is a ground-breaker. Holger and Richard have only just walked and devised the route. How exciting is that?
Pictures will come as soon as I can get them off the camera and into the computer
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