Australian Adventure Travel

The Commonwealth of Australia, includes the Australian mainland, the island of Tasmania, and various other smaller islands that surround the mainland. For the purpose of this site we will also include the neighboring countries of Papua New Guinea; the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia; and New Zealand in most of our discussions of Australia.

Australia was inhabited by human beings for over 40,000 years. First by the ancestors of modern Indigenous Australians, who migrated from Southeast Asia. The original Australians were hunter-gatherers. Then in the late 18th century Europeans came to Australia. Now Australia is a highly developed country and one of the wealthiest in world.

Australia is one of the driest and flattest inhabited continents on the planet. Yet still, Australia has a wide variety of landscapes, including subtropical rainforests in the northeast; mountain ranges in the south and the east; and a dry desert, known as “the outback”, in its center. Australia is an old continent that has been geographically isolated from the rest of the world for a long time. Because of this Australia has both a unique and diverse mix of flora and fauna. Over 80 percent of its flowering plants, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish and insects are endemic to Australia, as are nearly 50 percent of its birds. Australia is also unique in the relative scarcity of native placental mammals. In their absence, marsupials, a more primative group of mammals that raise their young in a pouch, have evolved to occupy the ecological niches that placental animals occupy in the rest of the world. Australia is also interesting because of the large number of venomous animals that are found here, including venomous spiders, scorpions, jellyfish, molluscs, fishes and snakes. Australia, actually has more venomous snakes than non-venomous snakes, unlike any other continent in the world.

Australia is truly “the land of adventure” and a must see for all real adventure travelers.