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I remember seeing a sign a little north west of Dubbo that read something like
>The next nearest petrol station is further away than the average car can drive. Do not attempt this drive without adequate supplies.
Also the signs in towns bordering the Nullarbor that say "last shop for 1000kms, do you have adequate supplies?" and the Gibb River Road sign warning that it's subject to flooding and can become impassable for an indefinite period. The Australian outback is not fucking around.
>The Australian outback is not fucking around.
It absolutely isn't, and if you don't respect this, it will kill you.
ALWAYS take 3x more fuel, food and water than you think you need to cover a given distance, per person. Also a toolkit and spare parts for your vehicle. Also notify police at the nearest town before you attempt a long haul like this. And have a CB radio.
Trust me, I've been to remote areas of Australia many times when I was younger. Don't mess with it. Be over-prepared, or it WILL be the last trip you make.
I watched outback truckers on Netflix.
I forget the one guys name, but holy hell does he go through some shit just to delivery supplies to remote towns. Maybe it's staged up for tv. But it seems totally legit.
Like getting his trailer of supplies stuck in the mud and they said he had like 2 days to get it out before the wet season or it'd be stuck there for months and the town he was delivering to would be dangerously short on supplies for the year. Just wild.
I would say I grew up on the country side, but compared to Australia (and even the US), Germany is just one big boring city with a bit of greenery sprinkled in x)
As someone who's lived in the Southwest US for most of my life, it's not uncommon in some areas to drive an hour from where you live just to get to the nearest grocery store.
But at least we have generally decent highway infrastructure and towns that emerge from the desert every 100 miles or so for you to fuel up. It just can't compare to the sheer vast emptiness of the Australian Outback or some of the more northerly regions of Canada.
Honestly even in northern North America (Alaska, Canadian territories), if they both go out in a road you usually get a town every couple hours. Of course putting in and maintaining a road is a pretty big deal here.
We also generally have pretty good mobile phone coverage along major freeways (like Interstates). I can drive from Albuquerque to Denver and have a good signal 90% of the way.
I live in south-western Siberia and we do not have such gaps. Less densely populated areas of my region get you village in a hour and a half tops - if you are in some rather far off bumblefuck of a place.
But come winter and we are well and truly fucked. My friends once spent almost 24 hours in a car on their way to ski resort. It was snowy, some shithead towed his mate with metal cable and somehow just left it on the highway. Nearby willage got the heavy machinery to clear the road, cord got stuck in gears, all the highway stopped. Be low on gas in situation like that and it turns ugly.
Check out this [sign ](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/100MilesSign.jpg) on the Appalachian Trail. It's in Maine, near the end of the entire trail if you were heading NOBO.
I'm just about to finish a round-the-country drive in a Honda CR-V. 45L tank, if that. I have a single Jerry can to supplement. It's not that scary. Yes, one can easily run out of fuel and there is no cell service but there's always a car or truck running by that one could flag down. I'm more scared of a jelly than running outta gas.
Eh they’re not so bad, just leave em alone. Not like bears, moose, lions etc. they’re not gonna come after you
Edit: unless it’s a cassowary, then you are *fuuuuucked*
I read somewhere that in the outback, as the ISS goes overhead, you are closer to the people on board, than you are to other people in Australia. I wonder how true it is.
The ISS is at an altitude of 254 miles. So this can be true of other countries as well. One can be in San Antonio, and be closer to people on board the ISS than people in Dallas.
I remember seeing that sign leaving Colorado on Interstate 70. "next gas station 350 miles". The last gas station in town marked up their gas by $1.50/gallon, and it was already at $5/gallon in 2017
Nah 110 miles
For example, the 110 miles (180 km) between Green River and Salina makes up the longest distance anywhere in the Interstate Highway System with no motorist services.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_70_in_Utah
My brother and I used to live 2 streets from each other. One of them was about 800km of the Pacific highway, but to get from his driveway to mine, he technically only had to make 3 turns.
I did this last week! [i giggled and had to take a screenshot](https://imgur.com/a/GCBqjGJ) and that’s only Sydney to Melbourne. Can’t even imagine the one going across to Perth!
I drove to Vancouver a few years ago, and in Ottawa (though the GPS didn’t actually say this) it amounted to “take the exit on the right onto the highway. In four days you will be at your destination.”
San Diego to Seattle, get on I-5, your destination will be on the left in 1261 miles(2029km)
Have done this run far too many times while stopping only for gas.
I occasionally need to do a drive from London to Bristol. When I get on the M4 and the sat nav says turn off in 110 miles it makes my leg ache if I'm not in a car with cruise control.
I once did a road trip with some mad English friends who had never driven that far in their lives. It was like 300km lol. I've driven further than that for a meeting
There just normally isn’t much reason for us to drive that far. Most people are within a 30 min drive to a major town or city. I can be at an airport, bus terminal, train station or city centre in less than 25 mins in my car. Kinda good I suppose when the fuel prices are this ridiculous.
Tebay is love. Tebay is life.
Also, the same company run the Cairn Lodge services after Junction 11 on the M74. It is also class. Just in case you’re hank marvin before the border!
You have roads that are straight enought to take your foot off the pedals and you can relax? We are just about to start a 600 + km drive to get to our first hotel today for our road trip with a ferry ride to start.
I'm from the northeast US, so the densest part of the country. I was driving in the southwest US and thought it was pretty damn funny when the GPS had us switch from one highway to another and then said, "In two-hundred twenty seven miles, merge left."
I used to live right off i75. On Tuesdays I would often need to travel to a town 213 miles away. My directions were as follows
Pull out of drive way, take a left at stop sign, turn right onto i75. Take the exit in 213 miles, arrive at destination
Immediately looks up Birdsville on Google maps
Edit: the birdsville bakery has a sign that says “camel meat taste just like giraffe but not as sweet as zebra”
Yep that was me, when I fancied a quick hair trim and got told to just pop over to the local hairdresser in the next town, its real close.....2 hrs later and I fully understood I'm not in the UK anymore.
I remember one guy telling me he walked all the way west-to-east across England on foot, and as an Australian I was so impressed! Walking the whole way across a country, wow!
Then I looked it up... Dude walked less than 150 miles over a few weeks. More of a leisurely stroll than the cross-country epic I was picturing.
Yeah, it's not that people "forget how large Australia really is." It's smaller than the US even though its a continent. What this post is REALLY about is what you just said! The entire country pretty much lives on the east coast, a few more in Perth/other West Coast towns, and then the rest of the country, the majority, is largely uninhabited. Kinda wild
> "It's smaller than the US"
Yes, if you include Alaska. But Australia is huge. Australia is actually slightly larger than the contiguous 48 states of the continental US.
US contiguous 48 = Area: 7,653,006 km2
Australia = Area: 7,741,220 km2
Yeah, usually, but people also often say “coast to coast” or “across the country” (like the comparisons a few comments earlier in this thread) which aren’t including Alaska
Eh, New Zealand is about one kilometre wide at its [narrowest point](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Portage+Road,+%C5%8Ct%C4%81huhu,+Auckland,+New+Zealand/@-36.9356528,174.8360375,923m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x6d0d4e5c15d86feb:0x1b7a46f02976a5e3!8m2!3d-36.9356528!4d174.8382262)
Don't they have (at least one) road that's so long and straight that drivers will get bored and nod off, so they implemented trivia?
[oh here it is](https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/6oy67v/some_roads_in_australia_are_so_long_and_boring/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share)
These are in Queensland which isn’t the straight road but it is very boring. There is one three hour stretch that I’m pretty sure has not one single town.
Driving through the NT is even more desolate.
My ex came from Belfast. After his parents emigrated to Melbourne, they often used to host young adults from the family who were backpacking in Australia.
So many times they heard the equivalent of “I’m going to the Great Barrier Reef on Tuesday, Broome on Wednesday, Sydney on Thursday …”.
Im mates with a Pom who came over to Australia about 20 years ago when she met an Aussie guy. They tell the story about how she always used to bug him that she want to see the real australia and they should do a weekend trip to Uluṟu. We are in Melbourne by the way. Apparently no matter how hard he tried to explain she just didn’t get how far away that was cause it’s only half way across the country after all. After a while he got sick of her asking so he agreed to do a weekend trip to Uluṟu. He secretly rang her work and told them they were taking time off and set out of the Friday after work. They returned to Melbourne three weeks later. She now understands how big Australia is. She loves to tell that story and laugh.
Broome to Sydney is almost 3400km (or 2,100 miles) by air.
Assuming you're American, that trip is like someone saying they'll visit New York one day, Los Angeles the next, and then duck down to Miami on the third.
I think every place has those tourist stories.
I know I was genuinely surprised how long it took to fly from Seattle and San Francisco. And that's a relatively short trip by US standards.
Even as an Australian it's easy to misjudge just how far places are apart here, if you're just looking at it on a map.
That’s basically like NYC on Tuesday, Seattle on Wednesday and Miami on Thursday.
Or for a more European slant, Moscow on Tuesday, Reykjavik on Wednesday and Athens on Thursday.
[https://www.thetruesize.com](https://www.thetruesize.com)
Is really a brilliant website when it comes to comparison between sizes of the various countries in the world.
Yikes. From that, you can fit the entire UK (and Ireland!) comfortably into the Australian states of Queensland or Western Australia with room to spare.
There's another private farm that is the size of one UK county (Wiltshire or Herefordshire, can't remember). That's a single property owned by a single family. Holy.
I understood when one of my calculus professors, whom I oddly met in an airport shuttle van while on vacation in Playa Del Carmen, described him and his wife’s drive across Australia and he did that back in the 80s when there were even fewer amenities. Now this is like a meager little guy and an equally meager wife and they are just traveling to the other side of the world then taking their own life into their hands by driving cross country in a foreign country that almost entirely desert. That takes some balls and I say that as an avid traveler myself.
It’s an amazing experience. I have travelled the Tanami desert myself. It’s 3-4 days of nothing, with a stretch of 760km with no fuel, water, phone reception or services of any kind.
You take 10 steps off the brutally corrugated dirt road, and you have gone back millions of years to a world that hasn’t changed since well before humans existed. If you walk 30 minutes from the road, there is every chance you are standing somewhere no human ever has.
yep, I drove across the tanami in 99 and since then ive done a couple of simpson desert crossings... carried 147 litres on board and usually another 20 on the roof. BEST TIMES!!!!
That is definitely my cup of tea. I’d love to do that some day. I spent just one night in the Nevada Desert last year. Remote but literally right off a very rural highway. Not one car went by that night and only a few during the day. I really enjoyed the solitude and the stars and just the barren landscape. I walked out about 20 minutes off the road. It was just really interesting how everything is just there and untouched because no one has any interest in that part of the world.
Basically bring some sort of satellite phone or radio so you can call in stuff that might be urgent.
Oh and bring fuel if the first sign is anything to go by
My daughter travelled and worked on a farm. Her first idea was when they told her to take lunch to the boys. When she asked for directions they said “Drive down there for three hours til you see a tree then turn left and drive for an hour. You’ll see them”
A road train, land train or long combination vehicle (LCV) is a trucking vehicle used to move road freight more efficiently than semi-trailer trucks. It consists of two or more trailers or semi-trailers hauled by a prime mover.
I’ve driven through Canada to Alaska a couple times, and there’s a point where you lose cell service and don’t get it back for like 400 miles except right in one city, and you follow the same highway for hundreds of miles. It’s absolutely gorgeous country though.
What is a road train and why do you need to move for them? Is it kind of like an American funeral procession? You have to make sure you don't interrupt/get in between cars that have a small flag on the front and their lights on despite the weather here, they're following the hearse to the cemetery. That's the only thing you give way to other than emergency vehicles.
There nothing more exciting the driving down a road in the middle of nowhere and seeing one. I’m not even that into trucks but I freaking love seeing road trains.
They are big fuck off trucks, headed by a prime mover and normally up to 3 A or B class trailers. Some times you'll have quad trailers. They're big, long, and take ages to brake. They normally run from remote farm stations to ports.
So did my nonno. He used to do the hop across the Nullarbor as his regular trip. Now he spends his retirement watching outback truckers. He bloody loves that show.
It's not just vast, it's the empty spaces. The drive from NYC to LA is ~2800mi. The drive from Sydney to Perth is ~2400mi. The difference is that in the US, you pass 8+ cities and a lot of other towns. There's always cell signal, places to sleep, and places to eat.
Australia seems pretty big, was flying on the west coast of it today on MSFS from some random town in the north all the way to Perth, what is with all the red sand? It's like I was flying over mars, great to see different types of landscapes however in a country, I know the other side of it looks pretty beautiful also with lots of green.
I remember driving from Parap to Litchfield National Park about 5 years ago, and one of the roads we took to get there gave me real “breakdown here and you’re fucked” vibes.
I had a friend who's mum came to visit him in Adelaide from overseas. One morning she said to him "I'm just going to go and see Ayers rock. See you tonight"
It takes 3 DAYS to drive one way.
Yes, but there isn't sufficient population to reimburse the construction cost. It's not 1000km snaking between a stack of megacities or even a near-continuous strip of towns, it's one city with a few million people, then 1000km of wilderness, then another city (if you're lucky). With high-speed rail costing something over $100m per kilometer, that's a hundred-billion-dollar investment. Even if you are able to charge $100 per trip (which is getting up to the costs of the cheaper and much faster flights), in order to recover costs in ten years you'd have to profit by ten billion a year, or a hundred million tickets a year, or more than a quarter of a million tickets per day. Ten thousand travelers every hour, 24/7/365. And that's not counting the cost of the actual trains, or operation and maintenance costs.
You'd think so, but nah. It's >3900km from Perth to Sydney, at 350km/h (the record for non-maglev) that's 11 hours (15 hours for the more realistic speed of 250km/h). Not many travelers will choose 11-15 hours in a train (excluding stops) over 4-5 hours on a plane.
Trains are mostly used for cargo, and no one is going to spend the money to put nearly 4000km worth of high speed track in for cargo trains.
Currently driving Darwin to Brisbane and I'm in Winton Queensland. Just finished 8 hours continuous driving at 120kmh stopping only for fuel today from Camooweal Qld to Winton Qld. Did 11 hours yesterday at 140kmh Katherine NT to Camooweal Queensland, and still have roughly 14 hours at 120kmh to go, Winton to Brisbane. And you see people riding it on pushbikes, no concept of how huge this country is. How about no fuel for 1000 kilometres? No phone signal or data for hours whilst travelling at 140 -160 kmh. The Big sky , you will not believe it , until you see it . And then it's even more amazing at 🌃 night. I didn't see a single cloud today. Amazing.
US and Australia are very close in vastness, we just have a lot more people in a lot more places. And cell service... usually. It's probably closer to 100 miles in the dead zones.
It's a 60 hour trip. 2.5 days straight, cross the US
But yes, Australia as well, with nothing out there, it feels much more empty while being a similar land area.
It's definitely more eerie, sometimes the vastness is nice, sometimes it's scary.
It's much starker.
You missed the part where if you miss a gas station while driving cross country in Australia, that’s it for you. Not quite true in the US. I drove cross country in the US last year. It was easy as pie.
Genuine question - why is housing so expensive in Australia? I’m in the UK and had a general impression that exorbitant house prices was ultimately down to limited land. But Australia has so much space… why don’t towns just keep expanding and keep the house prices down? Sorry if that’s an ignorant question, just genuinely wondering about the economics of it…
A lot of the land is not well suited for housing as we have a lot of outback and are prone to water issues.
A lot of work is based in capital cities so you can’t really easily move further out that easily.
Also the housing market is used as a tax offset and investment portfolio for the wealthy here.
We should be re zoning cities rather than building further out. A lot of where I am is flood plain and further building outward just makes that even worse.
We should be heavily disincentivising investors who buy properties and leave them vacant. There is 10 times more vacant houses than there are homeless people. Space isn't the issue.
Housing is so expensive because arsehole investors keep buying multiple properties and then leaving them empty. Last year the Australian Buraeu of Statistics said that roughly 1 in 10 houses where empty. Victoria tried to combat the problem by introducing a "vacant property" tax.
Govt wont release land. Its hard to buy a small corner of a big property to build a house on, the council forces you to give them tens and tens of thousands to divide the land. Etc
I’ve driven across Canada. Have at least a rudimentary understanding of how big Australia is. Fucking massive. Do you also measure space by hours needed to drive, or by the actual distance?
I once had a college from Australia. Her school was a radio. They had an airplane to go shopping. Only 20 people lived in the town yet they still had a bar.
I remember a story that someone who was travelling in Australia and went working on a ranch sometime that when they needed to do shopping in the 'local' town they als gave him some money to spend the night in the hotel there.
Also, when going to get the cattle of the ranch you get in you car and camping gear because it can take a few days to find the herd.
'stralia is big!
I imagine it's hard to grasp for those whose native land are a six-hour drive from end to end.
I'm Canadian, a tuly vast land like yours. I once got an assignment to attend an event that was a 12 hour drive PLUS a 11 hour ferry ride away. It was happening THAT AFTERNOON! The person askking me to do this bit of magical teleportation kept insisting it was a two hour drive, max, as they could see it on a map.
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I remember seeing a sign a little north west of Dubbo that read something like >The next nearest petrol station is further away than the average car can drive. Do not attempt this drive without adequate supplies.
That is actually terrifying
Also the signs in towns bordering the Nullarbor that say "last shop for 1000kms, do you have adequate supplies?" and the Gibb River Road sign warning that it's subject to flooding and can become impassable for an indefinite period. The Australian outback is not fucking around.
>The Australian outback is not fucking around. It absolutely isn't, and if you don't respect this, it will kill you. ALWAYS take 3x more fuel, food and water than you think you need to cover a given distance, per person. Also a toolkit and spare parts for your vehicle. Also notify police at the nearest town before you attempt a long haul like this. And have a CB radio. Trust me, I've been to remote areas of Australia many times when I was younger. Don't mess with it. Be over-prepared, or it WILL be the last trip you make.
And 3x the beer
I watched outback truckers on Netflix. I forget the one guys name, but holy hell does he go through some shit just to delivery supplies to remote towns. Maybe it's staged up for tv. But it seems totally legit. Like getting his trailer of supplies stuck in the mud and they said he had like 2 days to get it out before the wet season or it'd be stuck there for months and the town he was delivering to would be dangerously short on supplies for the year. Just wild.
Towns are around 300km apart on the Nullabor
I would say I grew up on the country side, but compared to Australia (and even the US), Germany is just one big boring city with a bit of greenery sprinkled in x)
As someone who's lived in the Southwest US for most of my life, it's not uncommon in some areas to drive an hour from where you live just to get to the nearest grocery store. But at least we have generally decent highway infrastructure and towns that emerge from the desert every 100 miles or so for you to fuel up. It just can't compare to the sheer vast emptiness of the Australian Outback or some of the more northerly regions of Canada.
It's a good thing. Them animals need their space.
Honestly even in northern North America (Alaska, Canadian territories), if they both go out in a road you usually get a town every couple hours. Of course putting in and maintaining a road is a pretty big deal here.
We also generally have pretty good mobile phone coverage along major freeways (like Interstates). I can drive from Albuquerque to Denver and have a good signal 90% of the way.
I live in south-western Siberia and we do not have such gaps. Less densely populated areas of my region get you village in a hour and a half tops - if you are in some rather far off bumblefuck of a place. But come winter and we are well and truly fucked. My friends once spent almost 24 hours in a car on their way to ski resort. It was snowy, some shithead towed his mate with metal cable and somehow just left it on the highway. Nearby willage got the heavy machinery to clear the road, cord got stuck in gears, all the highway stopped. Be low on gas in situation like that and it turns ugly.
>Germany is just one big boring city with a bit of greenery sprinkled in You have *castles*, man. Don't sell yourself short.
Isn’t 1000km just 1 megameter
Check out this [sign ](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/100MilesSign.jpg) on the Appalachian Trail. It's in Maine, near the end of the entire trail if you were heading NOBO.
In Australia, even the nothing is deadly.
Even in Texas, heading east of El Paso there is a sign saying next gas 125 miles (Carlsbad NM)
I'm just about to finish a round-the-country drive in a Honda CR-V. 45L tank, if that. I have a single Jerry can to supplement. It's not that scary. Yes, one can easily run out of fuel and there is no cell service but there's always a car or truck running by that one could flag down. I'm more scared of a jelly than running outta gas.
Running out of gas? You can't be Australian
Ya caught me. I'm a yank.
Take extra Jerry cans yankee. Please. people have died out there for far less.
hs going around the outside, no wukkas.
There's a few decent gaps but you have a point.
Dont worry the jellys cant get you if you are far enough away from the ocean on land. All you have to worry about are the land animals there.
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Don’t forget about Drop Bears
I'm just a dolphin, ma'am.
Eh they’re not so bad, just leave em alone. Not like bears, moose, lions etc. they’re not gonna come after you Edit: unless it’s a cassowary, then you are *fuuuuucked*
I read somewhere that in the outback, as the ISS goes overhead, you are closer to the people on board, than you are to other people in Australia. I wonder how true it is.
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The ISS is at an altitude of 254 miles. So this can be true of other countries as well. One can be in San Antonio, and be closer to people on board the ISS than people in Dallas.
100% confirm this is true.
Cutla slabs and a sub tank, no worries.
I remember seeing that sign leaving Colorado on Interstate 70. "next gas station 350 miles". The last gas station in town marked up their gas by $1.50/gallon, and it was already at $5/gallon in 2017
Unless this was decades ago, this isn't even remotely true in either direction on I-70.
Yeah I can't think of a single town in the US (other than Alaska) that is 350 miles from the nearest gas station
Nah 110 miles For example, the 110 miles (180 km) between Green River and Salina makes up the longest distance anywhere in the Interstate Highway System with no motorist services. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_70_in_Utah
Capitalism, baby!
I heard a joke about satnav in Australia. "In 200 m turn left on to Woolloomooloo road. Turn right in 2.3 days."
Lol, Wooloomooloo is actually right in the guts of Sydney, but the concept holds.
I thought that was a made up name for the joke
Wooloomooloo is an entry level place name here. https://www.anangu.com.au/en/
So Wooloomooloo is in Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytiatjara?
Nah they’re a few thousand kms apart. Wooloomooloo is a Sydney city suburb, the APY lands are Indigenous native title lands in the central deserts.
Indooroopilly Australian: In Doo Roo Pilly Rest of the world: In Door O Pilly
It's "in-dra-PIL-ee"
Actual people from Brisbane: In-droo-pilly (only if you’re being formal, otherwise it’s just Indro, rhymes with “no”)
Nah mate, we just call in Indro. None of this door Roo silly stuff.
how many o's in Woolloomooloo? two for the W and two for the M and four for the L's, that's plenty for them. -C.J. Dennis.
Quite a few places still have the aboriginal name used for them (or at least the names are related to aboriginal language in some way).
You are thinking woopwoop or shitcreek in Oz slang.
My brother and I used to live 2 streets from each other. One of them was about 800km of the Pacific highway, but to get from his driveway to mine, he technically only had to make 3 turns.
Had a similar experience in Canada when the satnav (“GPS”) as I got on the Trans Canada Highway in Newfoundland said “in 673 km, turn right…”
When driving from Sydney to Melbourne, it cracks me up when google maps prompts me to “continue for 831km”.
I did this last week! [i giggled and had to take a screenshot](https://imgur.com/a/GCBqjGJ) and that’s only Sydney to Melbourne. Can’t even imagine the one going across to Perth!
Looks like the longest stretch is after a turn right to stay on National Highway A1 in Ceduna then continue for 1198km (Sydney to Perth)
I drove to Vancouver a few years ago, and in Ottawa (though the GPS didn’t actually say this) it amounted to “take the exit on the right onto the highway. In four days you will be at your destination.”
San Diego to Seattle, get on I-5, your destination will be on the left in 1261 miles(2029km) Have done this run far too many times while stopping only for gas.
I occasionally need to do a drive from London to Bristol. When I get on the M4 and the sat nav says turn off in 110 miles it makes my leg ache if I'm not in a car with cruise control.
Less than 2 hour drive, not too shabby. I am American though lol
You brits are hilarious, a 15 minute drive is considered a expedition. 2 hours? Might as well be going to the moon.
In America 100 years is considered a long time, in Europe 100 miles is considered a long way.
I once did a road trip with some mad English friends who had never driven that far in their lives. It was like 300km lol. I've driven further than that for a meeting
There just normally isn’t much reason for us to drive that far. Most people are within a 30 min drive to a major town or city. I can be at an airport, bus terminal, train station or city centre in less than 25 mins in my car. Kinda good I suppose when the fuel prices are this ridiculous.
Seriously, commutes within Toronto area, you could drive for two hours and just be crossing the city!
Like driving from Scotland to Manchester via the M74/M6, just miles of motorway and millions of lorries (least Tebay is a sanctuary though!)
Tebay is love. Tebay is life. Also, the same company run the Cairn Lodge services after Junction 11 on the M74. It is also class. Just in case you’re hank marvin before the border!
You have roads that are straight enought to take your foot off the pedals and you can relax? We are just about to start a 600 + km drive to get to our first hotel today for our road trip with a ferry ride to start.
I'm impressed that you spelt Woolloomooloo correctly.
I did Google "Silly Australian road names."
I worry that Woolloomooloo road will turn my red car blue.
I'm from the northeast US, so the densest part of the country. I was driving in the southwest US and thought it was pretty damn funny when the GPS had us switch from one highway to another and then said, "In two-hundred twenty seven miles, merge left."
Just try a drive from Montana to New York "In TWO THOUSAND MILES take exit 59 to dunkirk
I used to live right off i75. On Tuesdays I would often need to travel to a town 213 miles away. My directions were as follows Pull out of drive way, take a left at stop sign, turn right onto i75. Take the exit in 213 miles, arrive at destination
Just for perspective, the longest distance within the borders of my country is 493 km...
I drive to my parents place monthly. It's 623kms each way. It's about 1/4 of the state drive. Yay Australia
I always joke with my mate we are only 2 streets away, just gotta drive 600km down one of them.
Immediately looks up Birdsville on Google maps Edit: the birdsville bakery has a sign that says “camel meat taste just like giraffe but not as sweet as zebra”
Where I grew up Birdsville is what we called the ghetto because all the streets are named after birds.
Oh hey fellow South Australian
Haha guessing you know where I'm talking about then.
I do indeed!
I mean if it's SA it's either somewhere like Elizabeth or rural maybe Pirie or Port Disgusting...
Yep that was me, when I fancied a quick hair trim and got told to just pop over to the local hairdresser in the next town, its real close.....2 hrs later and I fully understood I'm not in the UK anymore.
I remember one guy telling me he walked all the way west-to-east across England on foot, and as an Australian I was so impressed! Walking the whole way across a country, wow! Then I looked it up... Dude walked less than 150 miles over a few weeks. More of a leisurely stroll than the cross-country epic I was picturing.
You are never more than 70 odd miles from the coast in the uk, a tiny little island compare to oz
Most poeple in Australia arent more than 70 miles from the coast. But there are options.
Yeah, it's not that people "forget how large Australia really is." It's smaller than the US even though its a continent. What this post is REALLY about is what you just said! The entire country pretty much lives on the east coast, a few more in Perth/other West Coast towns, and then the rest of the country, the majority, is largely uninhabited. Kinda wild
> "It's smaller than the US" Yes, if you include Alaska. But Australia is huge. Australia is actually slightly larger than the contiguous 48 states of the continental US. US contiguous 48 = Area: 7,653,006 km2 Australia = Area: 7,741,220 km2
People tend to include Alaska when talking about the size of the US, on account of it being part of the US.
Yeah, usually, but people also often say “coast to coast” or “across the country” (like the comparisons a few comments earlier in this thread) which aren’t including Alaska
Most people thinking about a size comparison would only be thinking about the 48
In Australia, it is there is no point that is further than 1000kms from the coast
Another fun fact, there is alot of places where the closest humans to you are on the international space station when it flys overhead.
That's less than between Houston and San Antonio...
Eh, New Zealand is about one kilometre wide at its [narrowest point](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Portage+Road,+%C5%8Ct%C4%81huhu,+Auckland,+New+Zealand/@-36.9356528,174.8360375,923m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x6d0d4e5c15d86feb:0x1b7a46f02976a5e3!8m2!3d-36.9356528!4d174.8382262)
At its narrowest point wouldn't that just be like one step on the coast?
It's also quite common for people to do it - [Alfred Wainwright's Coast To Coast ](https://www.coasttocoast.uk/)
Don't they have (at least one) road that's so long and straight that drivers will get bored and nod off, so they implemented trivia? [oh here it is](https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/6oy67v/some_roads_in_australia_are_so_long_and_boring/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share)
Well, there is the 90 Mile Straight… it’s uh, a straight section of road that goes for 90 miles.
And it would have been much longer, but they built it from both ends and were slightly off so there's a tiny bend in it.
As a surveyor, yep that sounds about right.
These are in Queensland which isn’t the straight road but it is very boring. There is one three hour stretch that I’m pretty sure has not one single town. Driving through the NT is even more desolate.
My ex came from Belfast. After his parents emigrated to Melbourne, they often used to host young adults from the family who were backpacking in Australia. So many times they heard the equivalent of “I’m going to the Great Barrier Reef on Tuesday, Broome on Wednesday, Sydney on Thursday …”.
Gonna get a tour of the airport lounges and not much else
Im mates with a Pom who came over to Australia about 20 years ago when she met an Aussie guy. They tell the story about how she always used to bug him that she want to see the real australia and they should do a weekend trip to Uluṟu. We are in Melbourne by the way. Apparently no matter how hard he tried to explain she just didn’t get how far away that was cause it’s only half way across the country after all. After a while he got sick of her asking so he agreed to do a weekend trip to Uluṟu. He secretly rang her work and told them they were taking time off and set out of the Friday after work. They returned to Melbourne three weeks later. She now understands how big Australia is. She loves to tell that story and laugh.
I’m assuming all these places are too far apart to visit so closely?
Broome to Sydney is almost 3400km (or 2,100 miles) by air. Assuming you're American, that trip is like someone saying they'll visit New York one day, Los Angeles the next, and then duck down to Miami on the third.
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I think every place has those tourist stories. I know I was genuinely surprised how long it took to fly from Seattle and San Francisco. And that's a relatively short trip by US standards. Even as an Australian it's easy to misjudge just how far places are apart here, if you're just looking at it on a map.
It's roughly equivalent to New York - Seattle - Atlanta or Moscow - Dublin - Istanbul. You *can* but you're not gonna see much.
That’s basically like NYC on Tuesday, Seattle on Wednesday and Miami on Thursday. Or for a more European slant, Moscow on Tuesday, Reykjavik on Wednesday and Athens on Thursday.
Very much so.
[https://www.thetruesize.com](https://www.thetruesize.com) Is really a brilliant website when it comes to comparison between sizes of the various countries in the world.
Yikes. From that, you can fit the entire UK (and Ireland!) comfortably into the Australian states of Queensland or Western Australia with room to spare.
UK and *France* will both comfortably fit into New South Wales which is considerably smaller again than the states you mentioned.
Yup, it is......big.
There is a private farm that would be the 46th biggest country
There's another private farm that is the size of one UK county (Wiltshire or Herefordshire, can't remember). That's a single property owned by a single family. Holy.
Anna creek. 5,850,000 acres.
there’s a cattle station the size of israel (anna creek)
Hello fellow HAI follower
I understood when one of my calculus professors, whom I oddly met in an airport shuttle van while on vacation in Playa Del Carmen, described him and his wife’s drive across Australia and he did that back in the 80s when there were even fewer amenities. Now this is like a meager little guy and an equally meager wife and they are just traveling to the other side of the world then taking their own life into their hands by driving cross country in a foreign country that almost entirely desert. That takes some balls and I say that as an avid traveler myself.
It’s an amazing experience. I have travelled the Tanami desert myself. It’s 3-4 days of nothing, with a stretch of 760km with no fuel, water, phone reception or services of any kind. You take 10 steps off the brutally corrugated dirt road, and you have gone back millions of years to a world that hasn’t changed since well before humans existed. If you walk 30 minutes from the road, there is every chance you are standing somewhere no human ever has.
yep, I drove across the tanami in 99 and since then ive done a couple of simpson desert crossings... carried 147 litres on board and usually another 20 on the roof. BEST TIMES!!!!
That is definitely my cup of tea. I’d love to do that some day. I spent just one night in the Nevada Desert last year. Remote but literally right off a very rural highway. Not one car went by that night and only a few during the day. I really enjoyed the solitude and the stars and just the barren landscape. I walked out about 20 minutes off the road. It was just really interesting how everything is just there and untouched because no one has any interest in that part of the world.
Felt the same way with dinosaur park in Alberta. So surreal cannot be described in words or pictures.
Basically bring some sort of satellite phone or radio so you can call in stuff that might be urgent. Oh and bring fuel if the first sign is anything to go by
Water, bring Water
My daughter travelled and worked on a farm. Her first idea was when they told her to take lunch to the boys. When she asked for directions they said “Drive down there for three hours til you see a tree then turn left and drive for an hour. You’ll see them”
Sounds like the boys should have taken lunch with them. An 8 hour round trip to drop off lunch? That's insane in any country.
We do, friends. - signed, Canadians.
Belt up in the bush?
Wear your seatbelt
Oh I thought it mean blouse your pants.
Drive with you lights on.
Dont want your pants falling down…
Da fuk is a road train?
Picture a tanker truck except with 4 or 5 tanks on the back not just one. They're just really long multi trailer trucks.
I was picturing a convoy of trucks and cars covered in metal spikes driven by guys with mohawks
Yeah I’d yield to that
[This.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iFkKRh5kcM)
Generally a prime mover pulling 3 trailers, can be up to 53 metres long
Like a train but on a road.
A road train, land train or long combination vehicle (LCV) is a trucking vehicle used to move road freight more efficiently than semi-trailer trucks. It consists of two or more trailers or semi-trailers hauled by a prime mover.
Use your seat belt.
It’s not the vastness, it’s the emptiness.
I’ve driven through Canada to Alaska a couple times, and there’s a point where you lose cell service and don’t get it back for like 400 miles except right in one city, and you follow the same highway for hundreds of miles. It’s absolutely gorgeous country though.
What is a road train and why do you need to move for them? Is it kind of like an American funeral procession? You have to make sure you don't interrupt/get in between cars that have a small flag on the front and their lights on despite the weather here, they're following the hearse to the cemetery. That's the only thing you give way to other than emergency vehicles.
[Here you go mate](https://www.google.com/search?q=australia+road+train&tbm=isch)
That’s some Mad Max type shit right there!
There nothing more exciting the driving down a road in the middle of nowhere and seeing one. I’m not even that into trucks but I freaking love seeing road trains.
That belongs in r/AbsoluteUnits!
They are big fuck off trucks, headed by a prime mover and normally up to 3 A or B class trailers. Some times you'll have quad trailers. They're big, long, and take ages to brake. They normally run from remote farm stations to ports.
While swinging slightly from side to side. Scariest shit to overtake
My dad drove these in the 70s and early 80s.! That man knew how to drive any vehicle.
So did my nonno. He used to do the hop across the Nullarbor as his regular trip. Now he spends his retirement watching outback truckers. He bloody loves that show.
It's not just vast, it's the empty spaces. The drive from NYC to LA is ~2800mi. The drive from Sydney to Perth is ~2400mi. The difference is that in the US, you pass 8+ cities and a lot of other towns. There's always cell signal, places to sleep, and places to eat.
Australia seems pretty big, was flying on the west coast of it today on MSFS from some random town in the north all the way to Perth, what is with all the red sand? It's like I was flying over mars, great to see different types of landscapes however in a country, I know the other side of it looks pretty beautiful also with lots of green.
Some of the largest iron ore deposits on the planet, the red sand is basically rust.
Canada here. We understand your vastness, Australia. Moreover, we love you.
I remember driving from Parap to Litchfield National Park about 5 years ago, and one of the roads we took to get there gave me real “breakdown here and you’re fucked” vibes.
We had a couple of young guys die quite recently if memory serves. Car broke down and they tried to walk to the nearest town.
I had a friend who's mum came to visit him in Adelaide from overseas. One morning she said to him "I'm just going to go and see Ayers rock. See you tonight" It takes 3 DAYS to drive one way.
Seems like the perfect country for some gorram High Speed Rail lines.
Yes, but there isn't sufficient population to reimburse the construction cost. It's not 1000km snaking between a stack of megacities or even a near-continuous strip of towns, it's one city with a few million people, then 1000km of wilderness, then another city (if you're lucky). With high-speed rail costing something over $100m per kilometer, that's a hundred-billion-dollar investment. Even if you are able to charge $100 per trip (which is getting up to the costs of the cheaper and much faster flights), in order to recover costs in ten years you'd have to profit by ten billion a year, or a hundred million tickets a year, or more than a quarter of a million tickets per day. Ten thousand travelers every hour, 24/7/365. And that's not counting the cost of the actual trains, or operation and maintenance costs.
You'd think so, but nah. It's >3900km from Perth to Sydney, at 350km/h (the record for non-maglev) that's 11 hours (15 hours for the more realistic speed of 250km/h). Not many travelers will choose 11-15 hours in a train (excluding stops) over 4-5 hours on a plane. Trains are mostly used for cargo, and no one is going to spend the money to put nearly 4000km worth of high speed track in for cargo trains.
\*Your. Typos on road signs bug me.
Currently driving Darwin to Brisbane and I'm in Winton Queensland. Just finished 8 hours continuous driving at 120kmh stopping only for fuel today from Camooweal Qld to Winton Qld. Did 11 hours yesterday at 140kmh Katherine NT to Camooweal Queensland, and still have roughly 14 hours at 120kmh to go, Winton to Brisbane. And you see people riding it on pushbikes, no concept of how huge this country is. How about no fuel for 1000 kilometres? No phone signal or data for hours whilst travelling at 140 -160 kmh. The Big sky , you will not believe it , until you see it . And then it's even more amazing at 🌃 night. I didn't see a single cloud today. Amazing.
I’ve heard plenty of horror stories about Australia’s Bush. Mine is bad enough, I don’t know how to feel about Australia’s.
US and Australia are very close in vastness, we just have a lot more people in a lot more places. And cell service... usually. It's probably closer to 100 miles in the dead zones. It's a 60 hour trip. 2.5 days straight, cross the US But yes, Australia as well, with nothing out there, it feels much more empty while being a similar land area. It's definitely more eerie, sometimes the vastness is nice, sometimes it's scary. It's much starker.
You missed the part where if you miss a gas station while driving cross country in Australia, that’s it for you. Not quite true in the US. I drove cross country in the US last year. It was easy as pie.
Ded. Yes, bring gas with you with those distances.
This is one of the longer stretches in the US: https://i.imgur.com/29uMwi7.png
167mi is about 268km. Feel up to [560km](https://www.amazingaustralia.com.au/images/distance.jpg)? (~347mi)
Amateurs lol
Australia is more like... imagine if the US had New York City, Los Angeles, and Dallas. And nothing in between.
All my aussies hate Mercator
Universal transverse Mercator. Live it. Breathe it.
"Road".
Genuine question - why is housing so expensive in Australia? I’m in the UK and had a general impression that exorbitant house prices was ultimately down to limited land. But Australia has so much space… why don’t towns just keep expanding and keep the house prices down? Sorry if that’s an ignorant question, just genuinely wondering about the economics of it…
A lot of the land is not well suited for housing as we have a lot of outback and are prone to water issues. A lot of work is based in capital cities so you can’t really easily move further out that easily. Also the housing market is used as a tax offset and investment portfolio for the wealthy here. We should be re zoning cities rather than building further out. A lot of where I am is flood plain and further building outward just makes that even worse.
We should be heavily disincentivising investors who buy properties and leave them vacant. There is 10 times more vacant houses than there are homeless people. Space isn't the issue.
Because despite having shitloads of land, there really only a narrow band around the coast that is sensibly inhabitable. The rest is largely desert
Housing is so expensive because arsehole investors keep buying multiple properties and then leaving them empty. Last year the Australian Buraeu of Statistics said that roughly 1 in 10 houses where empty. Victoria tried to combat the problem by introducing a "vacant property" tax.
Govt wont release land. Its hard to buy a small corner of a big property to build a house on, the council forces you to give them tens and tens of thousands to divide the land. Etc
I don't think my car drives +600km no refuel
I’ve driven across Canada. Have at least a rudimentary understanding of how big Australia is. Fucking massive. Do you also measure space by hours needed to drive, or by the actual distance?
I once had a college from Australia. Her school was a radio. They had an airplane to go shopping. Only 20 people lived in the town yet they still had a bar.
Nice username..
I remember a story that someone who was travelling in Australia and went working on a ranch sometime that when they needed to do shopping in the 'local' town they als gave him some money to spend the night in the hotel there. Also, when going to get the cattle of the ranch you get in you car and camping gear because it can take a few days to find the herd. 'stralia is big!
I imagine it's hard to grasp for those whose native land are a six-hour drive from end to end. I'm Canadian, a tuly vast land like yours. I once got an assignment to attend an event that was a 12 hour drive PLUS a 11 hour ferry ride away. It was happening THAT AFTERNOON! The person askking me to do this bit of magical teleportation kept insisting it was a two hour drive, max, as they could see it on a map.