Kimberley Trip, Day 20: Rottnest Island

Tuesday, June 11, 2024

We have heard a lot about Rottnest Island, which is just off the coast of Perth. Rottnest (“Rotto” to the locals) is a recreational island with cabins for rent, several beaches with snorkeling (in the summer), restaurants, a golf course, skydiving, and more. It is also the home of about 10,000 quokkas. Quokkas are small marsupials billed as “the happiest animals on earth.”

We booked a round trip on the Rottnest Express last night, so we got an early start this morning and grabbed coffee and a breakfast wrap on the way to the pier. We got seats upstairs for both the view and the airflow. The trip started slow (about 10 knots) as we left the pier, increased to about twice that once we reached a broad section of the Swan River, and slowed again as we approached Fremantle. We stopped, picked up more passengers there, and then proceeded to Rottnest Island at a higher speed.

Although we had been equipped with a map, we weren’t sure where to go when we got to Rottnest. We stumbled on the main village and were heading out when we noticed some rain starting to fall. We returned to the village to get some snacks, and the sky opened up: it poured! We were thankful to be in the village as there weren’t a lot of other places to get out of the rain. While there, we noticed our first quokka and gates on the grocery entrance and other businesses designed to keep quokkas out.

Despite a lot of public education not to feed the quokkas, many of them hang out in the village to eat up the crumbs and other droppage from human diners. They are indeed cute, but the “always smiling” thing seemed a little overstated. They can be a little aggressive, too: when Kenna and I shared a chicken sandwich for lunch, a quokka climbed on the bench between us and tried to get to the sandwich. We moved rather quickly.

The rain continued off and on, limiting our ability to venture beyond the village until we boarded a bus for a “discovery” tour we had booked for the afternoon. The tour took us around the perimeter of the island, with excellent descriptive commentary from a guide on the bus. We stopped at several points to take pictures, most notably at the far west end facing the vast Indian Ocean, where there was also a large osprey nest.

Following our tour, we stopped briefly to pick up souvenirs (a t-shirt for me), and it was time for our return trip to Perth. Along the way, in one of the slower-speed segments, a couple of hydrofoil surfers managed to “draft” off our ship, keeping up for quite a long time. We were also tailed briefly by a few dolphins.

Returning to our hotel, we were exhausted but managed to venture out for a quick pizza dinner.

This article is part of a series about our recent trip to Indonesia and Australia. To see the introductory article in the series, click here.