Obviously, when you re going to an island with some of the best beaches in Australia (one on Kangaroo Island was rated best beach in Australia in 2023) one should go in rainy Winter, right? Of course not. But that's when WE chose to go. We kinda dig Winter. There's less people, and its easier to get warm than hot.

The ferry to the island runs fairly frequently and takes about an hour. We found it expensive at $220 each way but I guess it had to be done! Kangaroo Island is right off the coast at Adelaide and it's pretty big - bigger than our beloved Bruny Island off the coast of Tassie at any rate!

As we arrived late in the afternoon we found a campground only ten minutes from the ferry. There's not a lot of free camping on the island. I'll talk about this at another point but on this afternoon we found a council camp with a lovely view at Antechamber Bay. It was very neat and clean, and there was no one else around! Bonus.

First, a quick screenshot of Google Maps so you can see where we are a little. THis post is all about the top part of the island closest to the mainland, but we definitely lap it over the next few days, and make a decision about what we think about it and whether we'd go back, so stay tuned!

In the morning Jamie saw two kangaroos fighting in the water by the bridge - I missed it as I was making banana pancakes for brekky!

From here we drove to Cape Willoughby, where there is one of the island's three lighthouses. As you can imagine, with such a big landmass near the mainland, there has been a lot of shipwrecks over the years. THere's something quite compelling about shipwreck stories. This wasn't a terribly bad one as no one died, but I liked the story of how the captain ran back to grab some things from the cabin but was knocked over by a swell, and just as that moment a spar landed across his cabin. HAd he got in the cabin a moment earlier, he wouldn't have got out, and would have drowned.

One is allowed access into the front museum with it's usual maritime histories, and here of course a bit on whale watching as they are common around the island, but to see the lighthouse you had to pay $10 for a tour. I wasn't that keen - seen one lighthouse, seen them all in my opinion, and I was starting to realise that KI was going to charge us for a lot of things. The woman seemed very suprised we didn't want to pay $20 to see the lighthouse.

From here, we drove down to Pennington, which is famous for surfing. It was quite big and messy, and no way we were paddling out. KI and SA are also famous for sharks, so I was going to have to feel very, very safe to be able to go out in the water! I did love the beach though - wild and big, which is how I like my beaches.

There's a council camp near Pennington at Brown's Beach, which we did stay at on the way back - like most camps on the island, it cost $23 a night to camp here in season, and $18 out of season - quite pricey by our standards and you had to pay an extra $2 for 3 minutes for hot showers. Being winter, the campgrounds were empty, and to be honest, a lot were damp, cold and nothing on them really worth paying for, but without any free camps we were forced to camp there. If you were cashed up there was certainly a lot of tourist accomodation on the island - lots of gorgeous Air BnB's - but the costs there are way over our budget. I guess this was a bit of a gripe abut the island - once you were there you had no choice but to pay to breathe, and we started getting a little resentful about that! So if you do go, you'll have to budget wisely as there were more expenses than camping and the ferry as well - but more moaning about that in another post.