Kangaroo Island and Melbourne, the second time!
There is much I do not understand about the travel industry, but I’m learning. To my mind it makes no sense to get to Melbourne thousands of miles from our starting point, only to leave Melbourne and head back the way we came.
Ostensibly we were going to Kangaroo Island – a great place, and more about that in a minute. But then we were going back to Melbourne! Boggled the mind.
The reason, of course, is that lots of passengers got off in Melbourne and marketing must have decreed there was money to be made by putting on passengers (1000 of them) and taking them to a desolate island off of Adelaide. Those passengers were then dropped off again in Melbourne and new passengers got aboard and headed with us to Sydney – with only one day at sea in between.
There is money to be made in segments passages. So much so that no full world tour packages will be sold in the future. Everything will be purchased in segments. Huh! Btw, not too much fun finding out that some segments are sold on the cheap. Filed that away for future use.
Okay. Kangaroo Island.
This was actually a really good trip and one that Ken particularly liked even though it was a bus tour.
Kangaroo Island is an island south of Adelaide, very sparsely populated by people but full of kangaroos, wallabies, koalas and snakes. It is reachable by ferry, but everyone seems to know everyone. If a stranger is on the ferry the cellphones blow up warning people that the police are coming to check on drugs, according to our guide. It is hilly and tree covered in places, but with lots of farms which are owned by people like our guide. It’s hard to keep the young people there as making a living is tricky when there are only about 4000 people.
That said, we visited some beautiful sights around Kangaroo Island. Really grand beaches with remarkable rock formations, a lighthouse where the most wonderful ice cream was sold in the gift shop, a nice little town where we picked up food from the local bakery for lunch and bought honey produced by Kangaroo Island indigenous bees.
We had been told on the ship that despite its name there were no kangaroos on the island. This must have been someone’s idea of a good joke because after a while our guide told us how too look under trees to see kangaroos lying in the shade during the heat of the day. Hundreds of them over a stretch of miles. And one wallaby! We didn’t see any koalas, but learned to look where they might hang out so then having to choose to look for koalas of kangaroos. Lol.
Great day with a little boat ride on the tender back to the ship. Pretty good!!
QM2 2018 World Tour 