People make out that Kangaroo Island is just a short hop - if you'll pardon the pun - from Adelaide. These people are deluded - anyone who turns up in Adelaide expecting to catch a number twelve bus to the port is going to be disappointed. Cape Jervis, from where you catch the ferry out to the island, is easily a two hour drive from Adelaide, but it's really not something I would want to do as a daytrip. For a start, some of the things you're probably going to want to see - such as the little penguins returning to feed their young - can only be done after dark, by which time you've got no chance of getting a ferry back. A much better option is to do what Eloise and I did and book a two night tour which takes you out to the island, sets you up with somewhere to stay and takes you to see all the sights. Finding your way around Kangaroo Island on your own and getting transport out to the attractions is probably going to be far too much like hard work.

There isn't, however, enough to do on the island to fill two whole days - so the guide on the two night tour keeps you amused during the first day by taking you out on a boat trip to swim with dolphins before moving on to the port at Cape Jervis to catch an evening sailing out to the island. This was fine by us, and gave Eloise another welcome opportunity to don a snorkel and dive into the water while I stayed on the boat and took photos of fins happily slapping the water around her. You can never have enough of a good thing, especially where dolphin encounters are concerned. I wonder if dolphins invented happy slapping.

The ferry across to Penneshaw, the main town on the island, was a surprisingly large combination vehicle and foot passenger ship which was more reminiscent of the sort of transport I would expect to find shuttling passengers between countries. Previous experiences of river and water crossings in Australia had led me to believe that most of the islands were reached by something akin to a piece of floating wood with a rail on either side, but it seems that there are obviously enough people eager to get to Kangaroo Island to enable them to push the boat out, if you'll pardon the expression. The town of Penneshaw turned out to be a cute little seaside resort which didn't exhibit any of the usual stereotypes I had come to expect from Australian villages - it reminded me far more of a small American country town which had been dropped by the sea. There were two or three blocks of houses, all of which seemed to have little patches of grass out the front pretending to be gardens, and picket fences bordering the property. On a side road there was a small village shop which was trying very hard to sell anything the locals could possibly want, and I seem to remember there being a cafe which was probably in somebody's front room and was never open anyway. Walking down to the sea front, Eloise and I were amused to see diamond shaped yellow warning signs stuck on poles by the side of the road depicting waddling penguins, advising motorists not to be too overly surprised if they should find any making their way across the junction ahead.

Kangaroo Island is one hell of an odd place, and I really do mean that in the nicest possible way. Before embarking on our trip, if somebody had told me that we would be visiting a small island off the coast of Australia where I would be able to watch Penguins waddling back and forth between their nests and the sea, and wander along a beach jam packed with seals the size of the average sumo wrestler, I may well have suggested that that person should cut back on the hallucinogenic drugs. If they had then gone on to explain that the far end of the island was made up of a collection of abstract rocks that looked like they'd been carved out of the imagination of a psychotic sculptor, I may have had to go on to suggest that they should seek immediate help. However, this is indeed a pretty good description of some of the things you can expect to find on Kangaroo Island.

The Penneshaw YHA wasn't at all what we had expected from a youth hostel. There were no signs of any traditional dormitories, the place being much more in the style of a roadside motel such as a Motel 6 or a Super 8. In fact, I wouldn't have batted an eyelid if we had been greeted by a strange man dressed up as his mother and wielding a knife. There only seemed to be a handful of rooms, all lined up around the edge of the small car park, and the one at the far end had been converted into a combination kitchen and television room where we prepared whatever it was that the small shop on the side street happened to be selling at the time. Our room had one large bed which seemed to be an unbelievable distance from the floor so that we had to take a running jump to climb up onto it, as well as bunk beds pressed against the wall which led me to believe that this was more of a one stop place to stay for anyone arriving on the island, whether they were alone, in a couple or travelling as a family. Our large picture window looked out onto the sea front on the other side of the car park, but we got used to drawing the curtains as there seemed to be somebody else in the area who had a disturbing habit of wandering casually past at various times throughout the evening and smiling in at us for no reason. This despite the fact that the pavement outside our room was bordered by a picket fence which stopped just inches from one end of the window - so there was absolutely no reason to walk past unless you were actually intending to look in in the hope of catching somebody with no clothes on. Perhaps Norman Bates does live on Kangaroo Island after all.

First order of business after arriving on the island was to see the famous return from the sea of the little penguins in the evening - and I'm not just trying to sound overly romantic here; they are actually called "little penguins", for obvious reasons. Considering how many people go to Kangaroo Island just to see this spectacle, I thought it was remarkable just how restrained the experience was. As darkness began to fall, Eloise and I made our way along the beach and up a small sandy incline to the headquarters of the penguin tour which didn't amount to much more than a large wooden hut overlooking the sea. Inside, the walls were covered in photographs of the penguins and information plates about their habits, and we were sat down on chairs lined up in front of a television to watch a short presentation. Many of us, of course, were really looking forward to getting out there and seeing the actual penguins in the wild, so by the time our guide had finished listing the hundreds of things we mustn't do around them we were literally bursting and surged through the door onto the little wooden boardwalk which wound its way along the top of the sandy ridge outside.

Little penguins are certainly one of the cutest things you'll ever see. For a start, they're only a couple of feet tall which sometimes makes it hard to tell which ones are the adults and which are the babies. It was pretty dark by now - so dark, in fact, that it was hard to see where we were going as we made our way along the purpose built boardwalk - but we had been told by our female guide that we absolutely must not use flash photography as it would scare or possibly blind the penguins. I had no wish to ignore this instruction, mostly because I respected the wildlife and saw no reason why the penguins should be disturbed by us big hairy humans, but also because the guide didn't sound like the sort of person any of us would've wanted to mess with and her big metal torch looked as though it might make a mess if it were to come down sharply on the back of my neck. As we slowly made our way along the boardwalk, the guide would occasionally point her torch over the rails at a patch of sand near to where some penguin babies were poking their heads out of a hole, illuminating the area just enough so that we could see them but not enough that they would be scared. To be honest, if this goes on every night then they must be pretty used to it all by now anyway. The night sky was filled with the calls of the baby penguins, which sounded curiously like the cries of newborn kittens, as they called out for their parents who were out at sea and would be arriving home soon with their dinner.

It was the return of the parent birds that we had come to see, in fact. After spending some time wandering along the boardwalk watching curious heads poke out around holes dug out of grassy patches of sand, somebody suddenly called out that there was movement down in the ocean. Squinting in the darkness and peering through the tall grass on one side of the walkway, we were rooted to the spot by the sight of first two, then four, then many more little waddling bodies emerging from the surf and starting to make their way up the beach towards us, pausing occasionally to stare as though there hadn't been a group of humans waiting for them every night for years. A convenient sandy path led between two wide patches of grass and allowed the penguins to make their way laboriously up the side of the slope to a point where they disappeared underneath one side of the boardwalk and emerged thirty seconds later from the other to where their kids were waiting hungrily. This meant that we were able to get really close to the penguins before they reached the edge of the walkway and vanished beneath our feet. Some of the chicks simply couldn't be bothered to wait for their food, however, and had already started to make their way down the slope to the sea before the parents had even left the water, being met half way. This was easily the highlight of the evening, because we could watch them being fed right in front of us, their heads tilting back and mouths opening as they locked beaks with their parents and gulped down the regurgitated puree. Yum.

On the way back to the room for our first night on the island, we actually saw penguins walking along the pavement and crossing the road to where they had set up home under the raised floors of nearby houses. We definitely went to bed that night with a smile on our faces - how often can you say that you had to get out of the way of a penguin as you made your way home? Unless you've been drinking heavily, of course. My photographs, unfortunately, are everything you would expect from snaps of moving creatures taken without a flash - indistinct and blurry.

Luckily, though, Kangaroo Island wasn't the last chance we would have to see penguins on this trip - by the time Eloise and I had followed the guide back from the boardwalk to the inviting warmth of the hut, we had already decided that we were going to take an excursion to Philip Island when we arrived in Melbourne to see the famous "Penguin Parade". If we had been impressed by the night-time spectacle at Kangaroo Island, the penguins at Philip Island were set to totally blow our minds.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.