A couple of miles down the road is a turn off that leads to a walk which was recommended by the Park Service staff. After another five miles or so, the dirt roads ends in a small parking lot. An information board implies that there's a five mile circular route down to the coast (and an apparently famous sea cave) and back, and that is it rugged, so should only be attempted by experienced hikers. Naturally, we assume they mean us, even though we lack the expertise to find both of the paths) so we take the one we can find. The trail is called Ravine des Casoars and while it is certainly attractive, to call it a Ravine is a bit of an exaggeration.

	The path gradually loses height as it descends through the wooded sides of a little valley. Once again we're struck by the burned limbs, dull greens and rocky red earth devoid of underbrush and how starkly it compares to what we are used to.
	Eventually the trail hits the bottom of the "ravine" and we follow the stream for a while. Like every other body of fresh water we've come across, we muse about this being "platypus country," but now we don't feel the slightest urge to stand and stare. Finally the stream opens up into an exquisite little estuary. A boardwalk transfers the path over 6 inches of water to the other bank of the stream, then we walk along the sand to the shore line.
	High up on the cliffs that now form the far bank is a huge overhang, clearly the cave described on the information board and by Bill. I can't imagine what would entice folks to climb up to it. I can't even be bothered to photograph it. It is a tatty concave indentation, that's all.
	We weave our way through the trickles of water and quick sand to dip our boots in the ocean and capture a couple of Hooded Plovers which Wayne hasn't seen anywhere else. Check. We back-track up the estuary until we find the much better marked lower branch of the path, and we return to the car via the higher northern route. Left: a picture of Hooded Terns. Click on it if you don't believe me.

It is a beautiful mid-70's kind of day, and we don't have a lot on the agenda after our action-packed day yesterday, so when we stop for our usual lunch of a long black and meat pie at a bakery in the one-horse town of Pardana, we decide to sit and eat them right there, since the bakery has kindly provided tables and chairs for that purpose in a little patio separating their front door from the street.

As we are sitting there, a koala strolls across the road in front of us. We grab the cameras, and follow him to a nearby eucalyptus which he climbed so we could get the classic 'in the crook' shots.

Koalas are apparently on a eucalyptus high most of the time which is easy to believe as we watched and waited for this one to figure out whether to climb the tree or not...

I've been a little uncomfortable about the rather staged setting for yesterday's koala sightings, but now I truly feel like we can say we came across this one in the wild.         ...but the wait was worthwhile.

Eastward Ho. In her zeal to show us everything in the store, the assistant in the Eucalyptus Distillery made us try some sort of lotion, and over the last 24 hours we've grown fond of the smell. We divert to pass the store again. Inside the store three or four people are crowded around a two foot high wallaby, scratching its chest and stroking its ears. Amazingly, it is completely free—several times I see it hop out of the store with one set of guests, and come back in again with another set a few minutes later. S/he is as soft as a lamb. Now that we've seen the Remarkables, the poster of them hanging on the wall seems a much more interesting bargain, and I take that along with the body lotion. On our final Sydney repack it occurs to us that we probably bought 80-90% of all our souvenirs in this one store. It was just the right blend of useful, hand- and locally-made, earth-friendly, and of course, price.

Back in the car, we still have time left so we invent another stop: the salt lake at Flour Cask Bay. Hopefully another shot at some of the missing shore birds. The lake seems to form the remains of an old gypsum mine. The place is flat, and white, and although there is still water in the lake, its only a couple of inches deep. The shore birds are conspicuously absent. Abandoned by both birds and man, the place has a rather lonely feel to it, thought there is still beauty in its quiet, stark, flatness.

The one thing that we've definitely missed here on KI is the pelicans, and though the "feeding time" attraction feels too commercialized for our tastes (and we're too late anyway), we figure the the Pelican Lagoon Conservation Park ought to have a few specimens. We're being pulled by the gravity of the ferry departure, so we don't venture too far in. We get a close encounter with a Pacific Gull, but we need the spotting scope to confirm a couple of pelicans.

We make good time to the ferry, and in fact would be in time for the earlier one. But there's no bus connection for this ferry, so instead we watch it pull away, and we spend the last of the light enjoying a couple of beers, watching plantaginates and perhaps penguins making their way home for the night. It is dark before the next ferry pulls away, and perched in my usual position out in the fresh air I watch the harbor lights recede to a twinkle.

Then the 70 mile bus ride from Cape Jervis back to Adelaide. It is a little after 10:30 when we finally pull in at the bus terminal. But it is less than ten minutes walk to the hotel, and we've checked in with the night porter, dumped our gear, washed our faces, changed our shirts and returned to the lobby before 11:00pm. The hotel is on Hinckley Street, as central as it can be. We step straight back into the nightlife we had waded through with our double packs 10 minutes earlier. It was clear that the Adelaide wildlife was not keen on having its photograph taken, so we've left the cameras in the hotel. Which is a pity, because there were some pretty interesting shots to be had.

We find a bar fairly close to home that isn't packed to the gunnels, and where we don't have to lean into the smoke and the music in order to make forward progress. But after we fumble for vocabulary with the first round and end up with something too small, we have to ask the women at the next table for a lesson. Turns out we need schooners (which are not the same measure here in Adelaide as they are in other parts of the country). We have a couple of these, but by then it's midnight, and we have another early start in the morning. And as yet, we haven't decided whether to head north or south out of the city.