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I love Australia, even though I have never been there. It has amazing wilderness and is the setting of beautiful movies; it exports talented actors, actresses and directors; it has that Great Barrier Reef thingy, which is apparently so wonderful that is is a Natural Wonder of the World; and it is home to the stunning Sydney Opera House. And oh yeah, Aussies gave us UGGs. So we have a lot to thank them for.

Bill Bryson also loved Australia, so much so that he spent months touring its cities and the Outback. Bryson employed his usual humor in this travelogue, and numerous sections had me laughing out loud, sometimes embarrassingly so. But he would also wax rhapsodic about how amazing the land was:

There was no place in the world like it. There still isn't. Eighty percent of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else. More than this, it exists in an abundance that seems incompatible with the harshness of the environment. Australia is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile, and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents. (Only Antarctica is more hostile to life.) This is a place so inert that even the soil is, technically speaking, a fossil. And yet it teems with life in numbers unaccounted. For insects alone, scientists haven't the faintest idea whether the total number of species is 100,000 or more than twice that. As many as a third of those species remain entirely unknown to science. For spiders, the proportion rises to 80 percent ... This is a country that is at once staggeringly empty and yet packed with stuff. Interesting stuff, ancient stuff, stuff not readily explained. Stuff yet to be found. Trust me, this is an interesting place.

Bryson gets into his fair share of scrapes during his Australian journey, and at one point he and his traveling companion are in danger of running out of both fuel and water while in the Outback. Luckily, no serious harm was done.

Another close encounter was with a bluebottle jellyfish. Bryson and his guide, Deirdre, were boogie boarding at Freshwater Beach near Manly, when Deirdre suddenly grabbed Bryson's arm and stopped him from advancing toward the "bluey," as Deirdre called it. At the time, Bryson didn't know what she meant by "bluey."

"Is it dangerous?" I asked.

Now, before we hear Deirdre's response to me as I stood there, vulnerable and abraded, shivering, nearly naked and half drowned, let me just quote from her subsequent article in the Herald's weekend magazine: While the photographer shoots, Bryson and his boogie board are dragged 40 meters down the beach in a rip. The shore rip runs south to north, unlike the rip further out which runs north to south. Bryson doesn't know this. He didn't read the warning sign on the beach.* Nor does he know about the bluebottle being blown in his direction � now less than a meter away � a swollen stinger that could give him 20 minutes of agony and, if he's unlucky, an unsightly allergic reaction to carry on his torso for his life.

"Dangerous? No," Deirdre replied now as we stood gawping at the bluebottle. "But don't brush against it."

"Why not?"

"Might be a bit uncomfortable."

I looked at her with an expression of interest bordering on admiration. Long bus journeys are uncomfortable. Slatted wooden benches are uncomfortable. Lulls in conversations are uncomfortable. The sting of a Portuguese man-of-war � even Iowans know this � is agony. It occurred to me that Australians are so surrounded with danger that they have evolved an entirely new vocabulary to deal with it.

*Footnote: The statement is inarguable. However, the author would like the record to show that he did not have his glasses on; he trusted his hosts; he was scanning a large area of ocean for sharks; and he was endeavoring throughout not to excrete a large house brick into his pants.

HAHAHA! Bryson is a hoot, you guys. There is so much more great stuff in this book, and I could type out pages of other funny stories, but I shall leave you to discover it for yourself. Like all of his travelogues, he shares interesting historical details about the places he visits, and he's good at making fun of himself and his bumbling ways. I enjoyed this so much and I laughed so hard and so often that this has become one of my favorite Bryson books. If you like audiobooks, I highly recommend listening to Bryson narrate this. It's marvelous.

My rating: 4.5 stars rounded up to 5