Yet a few years ago, nearly half of the island-more than half a million acres- had burned. The number of full-time resident humans? Roughly 4,500. Koalas, considered an “invasive” species, total around 8,500. I knew little about Kangaroo Island before I arrived there in June, only that it is considered the “Galápagos” of Australia, home to roughly 900 Australian sea lions, seals, fairy penguins (the world’s smallest penguins), prehistoric echidnas (the only other egg-laying mammal besides the platypus), dunnarts, and glossy black cockatoos. Photo by Gagliardi Photography/Shutterstock Streetlights are minimal, and so I still cannot see the ocean or the green or that expanse of burn. Still, when I leave the restaurant and step outside to use the bathroom across the courtyard, where it is located, I listen and can hear the curl of the waves meeting the shore. I’m told the ocean is right across the street, but the sun has by now turned off her own light and darkness is a blanket over the 3,400-square-mile island, Australia’s third-largest. We sit at dinner at the Odd Plate, a cozy restaurant set inside a colonial home built in 1927, and can’t keep up with plates of buttery kingfish sashimi slicked with spicy black bean paste chorizo jam with cherry tomatoes and toast smoked salmon pastrami with pickled fennel. I count five rainbows in the 25 minutes it takes us to arrive in Kingscote, the island’s largest settlement (population 1,790). We coo and squeal and stand at the base of a tree, worshipers at the feet of this marsupial, whose very existence is threatened by the bushfires we have all come to learn about.Įventually, we get back on the bikes and pedal on-back to the car, back to town. “You may see one, but probably not.” We walk quietly toward the grove, until I surprise myself by hearing my own voice: “There.” There: drowsily chewing, a Big League–sized chunk of eucalyptus in its cheek, is a koala, reminiscent of a grandfather who’s had one too many scotches but seems esteemed all the same.
Thirty minutes later, when we dismount near a quiet bend of the Cygnet River to examine a group of trees for koalas, Michael tempers our optimism. Sunlight winks from behind the trunks, and sheep trot and trip in green pastures to my right.
I switch my bike mode to “power” and speed off through the countryside, legs pumping, streaming beneath low-slung gum trees. I’m used to riding my bike in car-choked New York City out here, with no cars in sight and nothing but a dirt road before me, I become 12 again. With a few instructions from our guide Michael from Exceptional Kangaroo Island, we’re off. There are four of us here together, and to get a sense of the island, we swap our van for electric trail bikes. I have never seen a kangaroo in the wild before, and here they feel omnipresent: pausing their feeding in a field to turn and stare, napping by a burbling river, bouncing off into the seemingly interminable distance.įrom the airport, we drive toward the Cygnet Valley, an area of the island known for its conservation park and red gum trees, which line the Cygnet River. The island off Australia’s southwest coast-a 35-minute flight from Adelaide-is well named marsupials here number around 65,000, about 14 times the human population. Instead, I’m immediately distracted by the kangaroos. It’s overcast when I land on Kangaroo Island, so at first I don’t notice the black of the burn.
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