Journeys

Perhaps the biggest change to our lives since moving to Australia is the difficulty with which to travel.  It has been said a thousand times before, but Australia is a long way from anywhere, even travelling around Australia itself can pose difficulties.  Adding to these difficulties we now have Jessie and Goofy to consider whenever we want to go away.  When we went to Adelaide and Kangaroo Island for a long weekend last month it was the first holiday we had since we went to Darwin back over Easter.  This was a big change from when we were in the UK and would go away almost once a month.

It had been a long time since I had managed to get an ADO off work so as soon as I had one booked Barnadi went straight out and bought flights to Adelaide, what we would do when we got there he left for me to plan.  With Goofy safely dropped off at the kennel and a spare key left with friends who would look after Jessie while we away, we headed off.  Now Adelaide itself is not a big city, it's CBD a grid system similar to Melbourne but surrounded on all sides by parkland.  It is not a very tall city either with very few skyscrapers and lots of old historic buildings still intact.  For transport it only has a single tram line which takes you from the north of the CBD down to Glenelg a seaside suburb.  But although we spent most of that first day exploring the city, Adelaide itself was not our final destination.  We hired a car at the airport and driving down the Fleurieu peninsula to Cape Jervis where we caught the ferry across to Kangaroo Island.

Admiral's Arch: Flinders Chase National Park

Kangaroo Island located 112km south of Adelaide is Australia's 3rd largest island at 4405km2 it is roughly seven times larger than Singapore.  At the 2011 census the population of the island was calculated to be only 4417 people, at roughly one person per square kilometre it is a very sparsely populated place.  To the aborigines, Kangaroo Island is known as Karta "Island of the dead", and they haven't occupied the island in over 2000 years.

Seal Bay: Sea lions

We stayed in the small town of Penneshaw just off the ferry, it had a choice of two restaurants both of which closed their kitchens by 8pm a reflection of the low demand from the low population.  The highlights of the island however are not the restaurants but the wildlife and stunning geology.  Despite the name we didn't see any Kangaroos on the island what we did see though was a lot of sea lions, fur seals, tamer wallabies and pelicans.  Our first stop on Kangaroo Island was Seal bay, although Sea lion bay would have been a more appropriate name as it is home to a colony of sea lions.  Like Philip Island and the penguin parade, the beach is protected and so the only way to see it is to go on a tour with one of the park wardens.  We arrived at 9am on the dot and so were just in time to join the first tour of the day with only a small group of 5 Singaporean tourists joining us.  The sea lions were so cute and their similarity to dogs, both in appearance and behaviour made us feel a deep sadness that Goofy couldn't be there with us.  Our next stop was another couple of hours drive away, did I mention just how big Kangaroo Island is?  Right on the most south westerly tip, within the Flinders Chase national park lies a stunning extremely windswept stretch of coastline.  The highlight being a walkway that leads you down under the cliffs and through to the Admirals Arch where a group of New Zealand fur seals struggle to bask on the exposed rock face as giant waves threaten to wash them back out to sea.  The wind was so strong that as we made our way down the board walk it was hard to breath, but the view at the end was more than enough compensation for the discomfort of getting there.  The wind, the waves and the rocks, all coming together in a way that words cannot do justice to.  Only a short detour away was the next unimaginatively named geological formation, the Remarkable Rocks.  These rocks lived up to their name, a strange collection of misshapen boulders left behind remnants of a long extinct volcano. That night we brought a couple of bottles of local wine and a large family sized seafood pizza and sat on our balcony to watch the sun set over the sea.   On our second day on Kangaroo Island we took a walk up Iron Rock Hill, just outside Penneshaw and found a nice little shop in American River where we had a brunch of fresh oysters and abalone.  We couldn't do much more as the ferry was booked just after lunch to give us time to get back up to Adelaide and our flight home.

Remarkable Rocks: Flinders Chase National Park

It was good to be home again and see Jessie and Goofy.  We had needed the break so desperately and it was a good trip, but even though we knew they were both in safe hands it was still a real struggle to cope with leaving them behind.  Jessie, being a cat, coped with the separation with out any obvious upset, she still got fed and fuss and that was enough.  Goofy was not so happy, whenever we bring him home from the kennel he is always a little quiet and withdrawn for the next couple of days and whimpers a little when he sees you.  It broke our hearts to know that in just a couple of weeks we would be sending him back there and this time for considerably longer.

It had been over a year since we last returned to the UK, the longest time since we had moved out to Australia nearly 3 years ago.  I was feeling incredibly homesick by the time this trip came around.  Once again the timing of this return home was decided by a wedding, although purely by coincidence the trip also coincided with the birth of my best friends first child.  With stops in London, Bath, Burham, Lavenham and Cambridge this was also the longest trip home we had made since we emigrated.  We managed to catch up with so many people this time, including a lot of people we had missed on previous visits.  When returning to Bath my homesickness was at its strongest, in some ways it felt like we had never been away, but there were changes too, some little, some not so little.  From speed limit reductions in Oldfield park to new housing developments along Lower Bristol road Bath was not the same as when we left.  It is not just the place that is changing, but also the people, I jokingly said to my best friend David, that since we moved away it was like our friendship had been put on fast-forward, skipping through all the day to day stuff and jumping straight to the big stuff.  The second time we returned to Bath was for his and Kirsty's wedding, the next time they had just bought a house together and this time we had arrived just in time to see their new born baby daughter.  When I think of Bath, I miss the place so much and of course I miss the people even more but I know realise I could never move back there.  Just like Barnadi and I, Bath and all of our friends have moved on, they are all on their own journeys, things haven't just been stuck on pause while we were away.  It is the memory of my time in Bath that I am homesick for and this recent trip has confirmed that the Bath of today is a completely different place to the one we left behind.