During the middle of June 2008, myself and six others from Britain, who are working on the new design of a desalination plant in Adelaide, decided to take a long weekend to Kangaroo Island. The island is situated about a couple of hours south by road from Adelaide and can be reached by a 45-minute ferry crossing from Cape Jervis to Penneshaw, a small village on the eastern side of the island. This 150km long island is home to a rich variety of wildlife including seals, penguins, koalas, emus, echidnas, platypusses and countless number of kangaroos and wallabies. We saw all of them except for the platypus and, sadly, the koala bears. It is Australia's third largest island (after Tasmania and Melville Island at the Top End) and is highly popular as a tourist destination with, allegedly, Australia's most pristine beach on the south side of the island at Vivonne Bay.

At the sleepy village of Penneshaw, we stopped to look at the little penguins. This had to be done at night as they're out and about on the beach near their burrows. Use of a red flashlight did not seem to deter them in the slightest and often enough, a few of them would waddle straight by us.

We drove to our cabins at Kaiwarra where we gatecrashed a treeplanters barbecue. The leader of the group, who I called Mr Bojangles, was completely legless and decided to dance after donning on a pair of ladies knickers in full view of the party.

A barbecue, many beers and much wine was consumed during our evenings at Kaiwarra which was great as we were pretty darned cold as the sky was clear and it was the middle of winter, however, the sky was clad with bright stars.

The next day, the group split into two, whereby the girls opted not to do the 'hard hike'. In reality, we didn't do a hard hike at all! Most of the trails were closed due to a massive fire which happened some months ago, however, it was interesting to see new growth with more colour emerge from the ashes after all the rain.

On the final day, we all went to a honey farm, Seal Bay and a eucalytus distillery, finally ending up at the ferry for our return back to Cape Jervis crossing the Backstairs Passage.