Exploring Australia

Présentation de l'éditeur Fodor's Exploring Guides are the most up-to-date, full-color guidebooks available. Covering destinations around the world, these guides are loaded with photos, essays on culture and history, descriptions of sights, and practical information. Full-color photos make this a great guide to buy if you're still planning your itinerary (let the photos help you choose!) and it's a perfect companion to a general guidebook, like a Fodor's Gold Guide. All the great sights plus the history and anecdotes that bring them to life • Extraordinary coverage of history and culture • Itineraries, walks and excursions, on and off the beaten path • Architecture and art Practical tips and full-color maps and photos • Getting there and getting around • When to go and what to pack • Quick tips on where to sleep in every price range • Savvy restaurant picks for all budgets Praise for Fodor's Exploring Guides "Most travel guides are either beautiful or practical. This one is both." -- New York Daily News "Beautiful...and the depth of text is impressive." -- San Diego Union Tribune "Authoritatively written and superbly presented...worthy reading before, during, or after a trip." -- Philadelphia Inquirer "Concise, comprehensive, and colorful." -- Washington Post "Absolutely gorgeous. Fun, colorful, and sophisticated." -- Chicago Tribune Extrait Landscape Girded by nearly 23,000 miles of coastline, the "island continent" has a simple threefold structure. The Western Plateau Almost two-thirds of the land surface belongs to the Western Plateau, a vast and arid tableland covering most of Western Australia, South Australia, the Northern Territory and part of Queensland. Mostly flat and low-lying, it is interrupted by spectacular individual features like Ayers Rock (Uluru) and the Olgas (Kata Tjuta), by rocky strongholds like the Kimberley and Arnhem Land, and by rugged ridges like those of the MacDonnell, Flinders, and Hamersley Ranges. The plateau is an ancient land whose fertility was leached away by rains that fell millions of years ago, leaving arid wastes with evocative names like the Nullarbor Plain or the Sturt Stony Desert. Similarly, winds that ceased to blow long ago left achingly repetitive patterns of sand dunes. Except in the tropics, rainfall is not only minimal but also irregular; none may fall for years, then sudden downpours will fill the normally vacant riverbeds, though the rainwater soon disperses to the great salt lakes. Much of the area is uninhabited or very thinly settled, with a population measured in hundreds of square miles per person. Only to the west of the Darling Ranges, on the relatively fertile coastal plains around the great city of Perth, are there extensive farmlands and a network of settlements linked by roads and railroads. Elsewhere, settlements exist in isolation as ports, mining towns, and staging posts along an interminable highway, or, increasingly, as centers for Outback tourism. The Great Dividing Range Running down the whole of Australia's eastern coastline from Cape York in the far north to the hills and highlands of New South Wales and Victoria in the south, the Great Dividing Range leaps Bass Strait to reappear in the mountains of Tasmania. It is here that the continent's highest peaks are found: Mount Kosciuszko in New South Wales (7,316 feet), Mount Bogong in Victoria (6,516 feet) and Mount Ossa (5,305 feet) in Tasmania. However, much of the area is not made up of mountains but of high plateaus, from which rivers run eastward across the coastal plain. The bulk of the country's population lives here, clustering for the most part in the metropolitan areas around the great coastal state capitals of Sydney (New South Wales), Melbourne (Victoria), Adelaide (South Australia), and Brisbane (Queensland). Rural settlement is relatively dense in the valleys between the uplands and all along the fertile strip extending into the tropics along the Queensland coast. The on