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.

A man browsing Google Maps of the Nullarbor Plain in Southern ... a caver searching for caves and karsts in the southern Australian outback saw an unusual feature around 20 kilometers (12.4 ...

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 ...