You know Australia is a big country, but you may not know how easy it is to get around. The untouched beaches that go for miles and deserts that touch the horizon are just there, waiting to be reached and explored. The following are the different ways you can explore our vast country.

Getting around Australia

Air

Flying is the best way to cover large distances in a short time. You can spend more time on the Australia’s can’t-miss landscapes and relaxing lifestyle. Moreover, competition among airlines makes great flying fees available for you.

Drive

Australia has a vast network of well-maintained roads and some of the most beautiful touring routes in the world. You have no difficulty finding car rental companies at major airports, central city locations, suburbs and attractions.

Bus

Bus travel in Australia is comfortable, easy and economical. Buses generally have air conditioning, reading lights, adjustable seats and videos. Services are frequent, affordable and efficient.

Rail

Train travel is the cheapest and gives you an insight into Australia’s size and variety, all from the comfort of your carriage. Scheduled services are a great way to get quickly between our cities and regional centers.

Ferry

The Spirit of Tasmania runs a passenger and vehicle ferry service between Melbourne and Tasmania nightly. Extra services are running during summer rush hours. Sealink ferries connect South Australia and Kangaroo Island several times a day. Ferries connect suburbs in our capital cities.

Walk

With easy on the feet pedestrian streets, walking is a great way to get around our cities. Besides all the above, you can also experience some of the longest tracks and trails in the world in central Australia—impressive journeys of a thousand kilometers or more that can take several weeks to complete.

Air travel can be annoying. But research now suggests global warming could make it much worse. To get off the ground in really hot weather, planes may be forced to carry fewer passengers. That might mean a little more space, which would be good. However, it also would make the passengers pay more.

Average air temperatures around the world are rising because people are polluting the air with increasing amounts of greenhouse gases, which, such as carbon dioxide, are a byproduct of burning fuels. Those warmer temperatures can influence an airplane’s ability to fly because air molecules (分子) spread out more as the air warms. This produces less lift under a plane’s wings, so a plane must be lighter to take off in hot weather than on cooler days.

It can even prove too dangerous for some planes to attempt a take-off. A record of June heat wave in the American Southwest, for instance, caused flight cancellations in Phoenix, Ariz. One airline ‘s planes were cleared to operate only up to 47.8℃. On June 20, Phoenix reached 48.3℃!

Radley Horton is a climate scientist at Columbia University. Two years ago, he and his graduate student Ethan David Coffel studied the effect of warming at four US airports and found that warming of track could triple (使成三倍) the number of days when planes face weight restrictions. Later, they explored the effect of rising temperatures on five types of commercial planes flying out of 19 of the world’s busiest airports. In the coming decades, as many as one to three out of every 10 flights that take off during the hottest time of day could face weight restrictions, they found. In some cases, a typical 160-seat plane would have to remove 4％of its weight. That would be equal to taking a dozen people off the plane, the researchers calculated.