DESERTS AND ARID LANDS: Stark beauty and solitude.

DESERTS -AN AREA WHICH recieves less than 25cm of rain a year – cover 25% of the earth’s land mass. There are rocky desert and mountain desert, hot and cold, even polar. With wildlife like oryx, snakes, fox, and mice, and plant life which has adapted to find moisture where none seems to exist, it is a great fallacy to say there is nothing in the desert. And yet, that “nothing” is often the great attraction.
Many of the world’s most fabled lands, names which conjure up images of bleaching fierce sun, and weeks without water, are deserts: Sahara, Gobi, The Empty Quarter, Taklamakan.
While Australia does have several of the world’s largest deserts, many of its famed sites like Uluru lie in semi-arid areas, not desert.