And that's Australia. My affection for the outback is, frankly, a mystery to me. Nearly everything about it is alien or alarming to my nature. It exceeds by a considerable margin my personal ...

You don't so much backpack the Australian outback as bushwalk it. A remote and sparsely populated area of Australia, the outback is a vast, wide-open place. But therein lies the appeal.

The Outback fills some 70 percent of the massive island continent of Australia, roughly the size of the U.S. It’s scantly populated, except for the more than 150 species of venomous snakes.