Getting Oriented

Big, vast, expansive, huge—whichever way you cut it, Western Australia and the Northern Territory are daunting. Western Australia sprawls across nearly 1 million square mi—3.6 times the size of Texas—while the Northern Territory adds another 520,000 square mi, together accounting for half of Australia's landmass, but just about 11% of the population.

This, in many respects, is the "real Australia" as you imagine it—remote, mostly uninhabited, the landscape ground down over millennia.

Getting around by road will absorb days, if not weeks, but fortunately air services can cut the travel times between the gems of this vast area—the Red Centre, the Top End, and the Kimberley, and Perth and Western Australia's South West—to hours not days.