Down Under

Bill Bryson had imagined Australia as a kind of alternative southern California. Of course, what greeted him was something rather different. Australia is the world's sixth largest country and the only island that is also a continent. It is the driest, flattest, hottest, most climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents and still teems with life - a large proportion of it quite deadly. Ignoring such dangers, Bill Bryson journeyed to Australia and promptly fell in love with the country. And who can blame him - life doesn't get much better than this.