I will be in Canada in a few weeks at an International Police Association dinner and will be required to give some details of travel etc in Aust. One question I dont have the answer for is:
How far around is the BIG LAP?
I know that many of you have done it, some more than once.
Somewhere around the 30,000 K? Did you look into projecting the whole of Australia on Europe (West border on Ireland, east somewhere in Turkey). That's an eyeopener for many people. But you travel to the wrong country to impress them with distances, especially travelling east-west
At some post offices or newsagencies you can get a postcard with the map of Europe superimposed over a map of Australia, also a map of USA superimposed over Australia - international tourists are sometimes flabbergasted at how huge this country is! Try and get some of these to take with you - as for distance - suppose it depends on which way you do it, as others have said.
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jules "Love is good for the human being!!" (Ben, aged 10)
I typed the route in Google Maps, Sydney, Batemans Bay, Traralgon, Melbourne, Adelaide, Norseman, Albany, margaret River, perth, Exmouth Broome Kununurra, Darwin, Three Ways, Cairns, Brisbane, Sydney. And that was 16,000 K's. But that is not included Tassie, Karumba, Cape York, The southern peninsula's Fleurieu, York and Eyre, not Arnhem Land and so on.
Funny thing is, that map of Europe is pretty old. By splitting up the former Yugoslavia and all the Russian and Baltic states we are talking of 51 countries nowadays that are covered by Australia. The biggest being Russia with 17,000,000 square km, the smallest Monaco, 1.9 sq.km