Penneshaw, Kangaroo Island, Australia

 
The ship celebrated the Chinese New Year during a day at sea, and after some bumpy weather, we finally celebrated
a nice day-at-sea sunrise.

The golden hills of Kangaroo Island from our anchor point. This wasn't an early day because of delays due to bad weather, but the tender line started at 5:30am, which was several hours before the tickets would be handed out. We didn't join that insanity, so we were not on the first tender, but we did get ashore fairly quickly.

 
While there were penguins on this island, they were little ones and would only be ashore during the night when they were not fishing. Nevertheless, some of our shipmates insisted that these king cormorants sitting on these rocks next to the tender dock were penguins. We tried to explain to them the reasons they were not, but their minds were not changed.

We had a plan to walk, as usual.

 
It was surprising to us that with all the people who'd taken the earlier tenders that we were still alone on the beach. We liked this blue, 8-pointed starfish.

 
The sandy beach gave way to jagged rocks.

We continued to walk along the shoreline. We knew there was a hiking trail further inland, which we'd join later.

 
We saw some more of those cormorants along the way.

A red succulent covered some of the ground around the rocks.

 
We were in a conservation park and were still following animal trails when we found this wallaby skeleton. We love finding these remnants of life in the wild.

 
In the American west, this would be called an arroyo, not sure what dried rivers are called here.

 
Much of the vegetation has small protected leaves or thorns, prickles or other sharp protrusions in order to discourage herbivores of this dry climate.

 
As we made our way in-between these thickets, we saw this lone wallaby, who seemed not to mind our presence too much.

 
We came back down toward the rocky shoreline again.

 
The eroded rock formations started to look like faces. We climbed up to get to the hiking trail.

More wallabies. They all seemed to be in the process of moltingr.

 
We watched the wallabies for a while and then set off at a faster pace along the trail so we could get to the head of land before we had to turn around to catch a tender on this shortened day.

 
There had been a farming operation out on the headland, which had used innovative methods and machines for easier thrashing of the wheat. Now just ruins and rusted relics are left to mark the spot.

The view was good.

We walked down the fence-line and then headed back into the woods...

 
where we found a huge termite mound. It didn't seem to be active, but we were not too interested in testing its viability.

 
We saw more wallabies and some probable wallaby shelters.

 
We set a faster pace toward the tender dock, which was on the populated peninsula at the top of Dean's photo.

We liked watching flocks of small birds as they flew in and out of the thorny thickets. Colleen McCullough, an Australian, wrote "The Thorn Birds" years ago. It's posssible that scenes like this could have been part of her inspiration.

 
We were back on the rocks again...

Dolphins! We'd seen them in the same area both on our way out and again on our way back.

 
We did a quick check of email at the tender dock and then walked the flag-decorated dock after a great day on Kangaroo Island. Dean's log on Kangaroo Island.

Our next stop was Adelaide, Australia which was a short hop across the bay. Actually, we made the quick trip in the evening and were tied up at the dock that night, but no one was allowed off the ship until the next morning.