Long devoid of tourist trappings, Kangaroo Island in Australia is a sanctuary for wildlife and wilderness, finds Mary Lussiana
After an overnight flight from Hong Kong to Adelaide, a 90-minute taxi ride from the airport to Cape Jervis, and then an hour?s ferry ride to Penneshaw on Kangaroo Island, you would have thought that my 13 and 14-year-olds would have nodded off on the final leg to our luxury lodge. But when the car hire rep told me, as I picked up the car, that I had just one hour before sunset and the cut-off time for the insurance, as all the wildlife came on to the roads then, and it was too dangerous to drive, my children sat glued to the windows all the way.
Australia’s Galapagos
We just made it as dark descended, but the heaps of bones and occasional mounds of animal that we passed on the roadside (with typical Australian humour called ?wozzas? by the locals ? ?it was a wallaby/kangaroo?) proved the point. Called Australia?s Galapagos, Kangaroo Island teems with flora and fauna, much

of which, due to its isolation from the mainland for thousands of years, are found nowhere else in the world. We learnt the statistics over the next few days, from some of the brilliant guides we had. There are 1,000 sea lions, 14,000 koalas (40% in fact of the world?s population), 20,000 New Zealand fur seal pups this year,  250,000 kangaroos and near on 1,000,000 tammar wallabys. But it was not those that we have taken away with us.
It was the wonder of seeing nat...