The Tyranny of Distance

I have done a fair few kilometers so far, often thinking about the distances involved to get from A to B. Now, for all of you who look at this blog back in the "Old Countries", its probably worthwhile to put it all into some sort of perspective. Today I got a post card that shows just that, the size in square kilometres of the European countries and the map of Europe super-imposed on top of Australia. At the bottom left it says that Europe has a Total of 3,687,245 km2 against Australia with a Total of 7,686,848km2. Now that makes Australia more than twice the size of All-Of-Europe.

The distances quoted for Australia on that card tell the rest of the story, i.e.:

Darwin - Perth 4396km,
Perth - Adelaide 2706km,
Melbourne - Sydney 887km,
Sydney - Brisbane 972km and
Brisbane - Cairns 1748km


One would also do well to remember, that often between reasonably sized townships, there is very little, or perhaps I should say, a limited number of places where one could stay for any length of time. As a consequence, I often have to cover quite some distance to get to another sight to see, or accessible place that I can discover for myself (i.e: is there a road and can I drive on it with my van? Some of them are stricty 4-wheel-drive roads where my van would get me into trouble). I am saying this because some of you have expressed, that I should take more time. As a consequence, I have in fact stayed a lot longer at places that I particularly liked. I have also been busy with the camera, having taken so far, about 2500 pictures, a small selection of which I have shared with you via this blog, in a very small format, just to convey an idea of what I am seeing.

On October 22, I will return to Sydney by air, for several weeks, where I will setup some Photo Albums on the web, of my pictures taken up to my time at Perth. Once that has been done I will let you know in the blog, where you can find those images on the web so you can also experience those pictures in a large, screen-filling format, which will do a lot more justice to the various landscapes I have been traveling through. So, stay tuned.

In December I will return to Perth, where I will have left my van, to continue my journey around the southern parts of Australia. More about that in the continuing blog.