We came expecting to simply see the kangaroos, but it turned out to be other creatures that truly made the day. The thousands of New Zealand fur seals, almost 30,000 koalas, and 700,000 sheep that reside on South Australia's Kangaroo Island present some pretty amazing wildlife watching.

Thankfully, we departed the ferry with a four-wheel-drive rental, which we found out to be the only way to effectively travel the island's 1,600 kilometers of roadways, seeing as how 85 percent of them are unpaved. The main road leads south to Seal Bay where we happen upon nearly 600 Australian sea lions. Their large front flippers and hind flippers that actually rotate forward helps them to walk on land, and they seem quite tame, but visitors are asked to keep away by at least 10 meters.

Traveling onward to the western region of Kangaroo Island, along the shoreline of Flinders Chase National Park, is a landscape that has remained almost unchanged for thousands of years. Moving about the rocks that halt powerful waves is a large colony of New Zealand fur seals. The seals stay close to the land, most of them making their way around Admirals Arch, a rock formation that presents a large window to the sea. Over a period of 500 million years, heat, cold, rain and aridity have sculpted the rocks into odd shapes. Flinders Chase National Park was founded in 1919, ten years after the building of nearby Cape du Couedic Lighthouse. At the time, the park was only the third nature reserve of its kind in all of Australia. The Visitor Centre there provides historical insight, explaining how the unique wildlife habitat developed on the island, which was broken off from the mainland 15,000 years ago when the sea level increased.

In the 1920s, Australia's famous koalas were actually threatened with extinction on the mainland, so 18 of them were introduced to the island. Amazingly, they have the probable greatest density of koalas in all of Australia. Just as we were beginning to think of the place as Koala Island, we made our bumpy way along the route to the south-western part of the island and finally laid eyes upon the island's namesake- kangaroos in the waist-high grasslands of Kelly Hill Conservation Park. They remain cautiously aloof- this time it is they who remain 10 meters from us.

The ride back to the ferry presented a pastoral scene as we passed field after field of sheep. This is also a very common sight on the mainland- in fact, it is Australia's 85.7 million sheep, most of which are merinos, that produce the bulk of the planet's wool. Kangaroos are also plentiful on the mainland- in fact there are 40 million kangaroos in Australia, a number that has increased since Australia was first settled.

A large variety of wildlife not found anywhere else in the world resides in Australia today. Half of the 800 species of birds are unique to the country. The coastal regions boast more than 4,000 fish varieties and tens of thousands of species of invertebrates, plants and micro-organisms. Amazingly, nearly 80 percent of the southern marine species can be found in no other place on Earth. Unique flora such as the Wollemi pine, the grass tree, and colorful wildflowers are abundant on the continent, which is home to an astounding 25,000 species of plants.