The Rubicon (just kidding, it's only the last post about break)

Okay, I am going to try to squeeze the rest of break into one last entry and still not have it be super long, so bear with me as I attempt the impossible. Well, first of all we found this amazing hostel to stay in in Adelaide which gave us free rice and free hot apple pie with ice cream and custard every night. There was a dear old Scottish man who owned the place named Peter, and he had been all over the world but had finally settled down to run this old hostel in Adelaide and he was the custard master. So every night while we were working on dinner, he would come in and putter around and fix the custard and pop the pies into the oven. And then about forty minutes later, he comes back in and sticks his head in the oven to check on the pies and with all the ire and righteous indignation one can imagine,this dear sweet old man says, "Shit!" by which he of course meant that the oven was broken and the pies, as yet, unbaked. Thryn and I had to focus very hard on our plates of rice in order to keep from laughing. But at any rate, we could not enjoy the company of Peter for as long as we might have wished to, because we were soon off from the pleasant green hills of Adelaide and on our way to Kangaroo Island. We had to book a tour in order to see KI, but I'm glad that we did, because it ended up being one of my favorite parts of the trip.

KI is like wildlife central for Australia, so we got to walk on the beaches with the sea lions, stand face to face with a koala, and cuddle a baby kangaroo (that last part was a big bonus, Flinders Chase Visitor center had taken in a joey who's mother had been hit by a car, and we got to have a little visit. So soft!!!). We also got to see NZ fur seals, echidnas, wallabies, and one fairy penguin. Then the second day we got to go on this hike through this big rocky gorge that had a stream flowing through the bottom that was so clean we could drink out of it, even though the water was red. We also got to see tea trees, which is where tea tree oil comes from. My dad has always been a big believer in the merits of tea tree oil, so I was excited to see the source for myself. The rocks in this gorge were amazing, metamorphic layers all along the bottom with metamorphic rocks of all different kinds along the path, and pieces of loose limestone mixed in which had fallen down from higher up where the walls were sedimentary. They even had caves up along the ridge of this kind of gorge thing. It was a geologists paradise. Then we hiked all the way out to where the gorge meets the sea, but we couldn't go too far out because the gorge suffers from "freak waves." This basically means that you can look out on a wide empty beach about 200 feet away to the waves one minute, and the next minute, the water can be up and soaking your shoes. There's a narrow little opening from this beach out onto the sea, and a bunch of waves will all surge in at once and move up the beach as quick as lightning. It was such a cool place.

I think the thing that made the tour really worthwhile though was the fact that Toni, our guide, was so amazing. She was fairly young, and she had this amazing sense of humor that was really engaging and helped us to feel comfortable joking around with her right away. She was really interesting too, she knew so much about cultural things and she had travelled around quite a bit, as most people in Australia seem to have done. She was a regular naturalist, with all the different things that she knew about the plants and animals and even geology. She wanted to know what I thought about the gorge that we hiked through and how it was formed, so we swapped opinions about subduction zones and tectonic movement. Then the one night that we stayed on the island we got to sleep in this adorable little farmhouse with a little kitchen and a loft and a barbie in the front porch and kangaroos roaming around in the front yard. It was such a fun tour, I really love KI and I would go back in a heartbeat.

The last few days we spent around the bustling metropolis known as "Magnificent Quorn" (okay, so it's only Thryn that calls it that, and it's an incredibly dinky town, but we had a good time. We were exploring the Southern Flinders Ranges, which is an incredibly beautiful area north of Adelaide. We climbed a couple of mountains (Dutchman's Stern and Devil's Peak) and hiked through Warren's Gorge (aka the Valley of Bones and Flies). The hiking was great, because it cost us money for every little hiking point the hostel people drove us too, so we would basically just go to one and stay all day. We ended up spending a lot of time just out in nature, sitting on a big boulder and staring at an amazing view. There's something about that experience that is so purifying to the soul, you know? Devil's Peak was insane, it was so rocky and there was almost no trail, but I really enjoyed the challenge of climbing. At the top there was a kind of visitor's book where everyone who had made it would sign. The entries in there were pretty funny. My favorite was "Erasmus was here." Warren's Gorge was pretty crazy. First of all, the amount of flies there was absolutely insane. I don't know if they just prefer the low places or what because we were much more bothered by them that day than the other days. Also, there were many bones and dead kangaroos in this particular valley. And the day that we went through was particularly cloudy and ominous, and the place was so strange that it was quite portentious, I was definitely expecting a dwarf or a witch to pop out or for something of mystical quality to happen. The other great thing about "Magnificent Quorn" was that our hostel had a whole movie cabinet full of WESTERNS!! Which meant that one night, after a full day of climbing, we ended up chilling with, that's right, Gunga Din. Quality, quality film, although I will say that Cary Grant has THE worst fake British accent I have ever heard. Well, after such thrills, what can be left of an adventure except a tortourous all night bus trip back to the cozy confines of urban living?

And it is there friends, that my epic tale must at last come to an end, and so, once again, for the time being, I bid you adieu.