Adelaide – Jul 15, 2008
Our only purpose in visiting Adelaide really was to catch a plane from there to Kangaroo Island, just a twenty minute flight away. We stayed one night before and one after our island visit but it was enough. It’s a smallish city whose most remarkable physical features are its uncommonly wide boulevards and a summer in which, so the locals will tell you, it gets hot enough to suck the air out of your lungs. It is also a city centered in a major wine making area of the country, a nice feature for sure but not quite sufficient to make up for the hot lung thing.
The flight to Kangaroo Island was just twenty minutes over a narrow strait separating it from the mainland. Upon arrival we were met at the modest airport by a car and driver from our destination, the new, super chic eco-resort, Southern Ocean Lodge. An hour’s drive away, the place was about as remote as it’s possible to get on the island.
When at last we arrived, the long trek to get there seemed almost worthwhile. With its one-floor, modern, monochromatic design and its location sited atop a seaside cliff, the resort blended neatly into the island’s low brush and rocky terrain. It is the newest of a trend in Aussie resorts catering to the tiresome “I’m-an-environmentalist” crowd. The rather high all-inclusive rates include small, guided group tours to the island’s most prominent natural features. I decided that instead of watching sea lions mating on the rocks, something that while in Alaska I had seen often enough (it ain’t all that interesting), I would instead take generous advantage of the resort’s “free” bar and the massage parlor, also known as a “sumptuous spa”. Besides it was really cold, wet and blustery outside and given a choice between sea lion watching in those insalubrious conditions and a warm bar and massage…well, it wasn’t really all that tough a decision.
On our second day, Kitty and Grant convinced me, much against my skeptical nature in such matters, to join them in a “champagne and kangaroo” lunch. This consisted of swilling bubbly and noshing on tidbits from the tailgate of an SUV while watching a gaggle of roos munching away on a field of grass. That it was also about thirty freaking degrees and breezy to boot did not contribute much to my enjoyment, or theirs, of the eco-affair so it was back to the bar and massage parlor.
Later, I suggested to the management that on days marked by biting cold and insistent wind they should offer for those of us not fully committed to the bracing rewards of outdoor life something more agreeable, like TV reruns of Marlin Perkins on the Mutual of Omaha’s Animal Kingdom, or Wild Kingdom, or whatever it was called. I didn’t sense an eagerness to adopt my sensible idea.