Amazing Wildlife on Kangaroo Island

You can't visit South Australia without taking a look on Kangaroo Islannd and after looking through some visitor centre's guides we decided to go for a long weekend!

Kangaroo Island has 7 regions; West End, South Coast, North Coast, Kingscote District, The Heartland, American River and The Dudley Penisula where you'll arrive by ferry in Penneshaw.

Koala close up

We drove up to Cape Jervis where we took a Sealink ferry. You can book for this ferryride through their website and a return ticket will cost you about 39 AUD pp and 79 AUD p. vehicle.

In Penneshaw you'll find a great Visitors Centre where they are happy to give you a map of the island and explain all of its turistic highlights.

Kangaroo Island is mostly famous for its great wildlife viewings. Not only will you find numurous kangaroo's and wallabies but there are also two seal and penguin populations on the island for you to visit. The penguins can be seen at night, around 8 pm when they come back from a long day of hunting on see and seek some shelter on the rocks and beaches. The two spots to see them are in Kingscote ( the bigger population ) and in Penneshaw where a new and smaller operator hosts the penguin tours.

If you want to visit the penguins be sure to stay around these towns as it isn't wise to drive around the island at night and distances aren't small. For example, we stayed at the Kangeroo Island Wilderness Retreat, in the West End, which is about 120 km from these places. Not close to the penguins maybe but a great location to see other wildlife like koala's, possums, kangaroo's, wallabies and...seals!

Ready to board

There are two places where you'll find the seals on Kangaroo Island, one is at Seal Bay along the South Coast and the other spot is around Admirals Arch in the West End and within the Flinders Chace National Park.

While Seal Bay is a beachy breeding ground for Australian seals the ones you'll find in the rocky west are New Zealand fur seals. Both are super cute but you can only get to the seals in Seal Bay through the seal centre build there. You can either choose to do a boardwalk (12.50 AUD pp) or a guided tour (27,50 AUD) but with both walks you won't get closer then about 10 metres from the seals. So my advice is to do the board walk and to save your snap shots for Admirals Arch where you can see them from a boardwalk aswell but when you walk into the Admirals Arch cave you get a really good look of them, especially later in the afternoon when turists leave and sun starts coming down. The seals then wake up from their sleepy siesta and if you're lucky you'll catch them playing and hunting for fish!

At the ferry

Close to Admirals Arch, about 4km, you'll find the Remarkable Rocks, a group of beautifully shaped rocks which are gorgeous around sunset when they glow all red.

Be careful on the way back if you're driving in the late afternoon because there will be kangaroos and wallabies crossing over!