Day 2 at GKI

DAY 2 at Great Keppel

(Sunday)

I’ve never been so grateful to see daylight.

After the longest night known to man, I ventured out of the tent with my book ‘I Am The Cheese’, which I started on the plane, and took up residence in a big stuffed arm chair just outside Geoff’s office and sunbathed while I read. Shortly thereafter, Caroline joined me and we decided to explore Putney Beach, as we’d seen Fisherman’s Beach yesterday. (See map Here.) We took lots of pictures:

And encountered the first humans for the day. There were less than ten people in the Village, and probably less than twenty on the entire 4k long island. From here on out, Great Keppel Island will simply be known as ‘Our Island’.

We bought some cereal off Geoff for breakfast and finally finished that stupid grocery list and handed it in. There we met Cheyenne, a nice 25-30 something year old who we would run into many more times, and her English friend Matt. She presented us with a riddle:

Name ten, three-lettered body parts that can become other words which are not body parts. For example, A-R-M becomes H-A-R-M. She had nine, which was all we could come up with.

ARM

TOE
LIP
EYE

EAR

LEG

HIP

RIB

Anyone?

After warming up our brains, we did a little writing, then a little more reading, then headed to Grandma’s for lunch. I don’t know Grandma’s real name, but she operates a little café out of her kitchen, literally. You tell her what you want, and she’ll make it. Tea, coffee, scones, sandwiches, cakes, that kind of stuff. She also has a freezer with individual ice cream bars and cones. We got her to make us some sandwiches to eat and some for tomorrow, since because we were lazy with our grocery list we still didn’t have anything to eat. But at least we could count on Grandma.

Leaving Grandma, we saw some Rainbow Lorikeets in this bizarrely-flowering tree:

Then we headed back to the tent and guess who came around again, this time taking a moment out of his busy schedule to pose for a picture?

From here on out, the Goanna is known as Gary. Good old Gary. (Check out the Big Picture on photobucket.)

That night we got a beautiful sunset—much more pleasant when you’re not trying to eat:

And as if I wasn’t thrilled enough by the close-up of Gary, tonight we had another visitor. Caroline and I were sitting on our deck, talking in the dark, when this little guy came to visit:

So this is an Australian Brush Tailed Possum. Not at all like those ugly American Possums! This little guy was actually really cute, and I broke the Do-Not-Feed-The-Animals rule and gave it a bit of banana bread, which he enjoyed quite thoroughly. And, because we have to name every animal we encounter, Possum became Kitty and I was able to sleep much better knowing what I was dealing with.

And the Curlews kind of sound like puppies. Ghost puppies.

I still, however, woke up half-way through the night SURE that something was in the tent.