Katoomba, Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia.

A very lovely area. More a canyon-gouged plateau than a mountain range, with roads and towns on top and just raw nature in the valleys. Sandstone edges above huge areas of forest. More birds than you can shake a stick at, including cockatoos, parrots and some vividly red-breasted oiaseaux de la foret. Apart from them, the only indigenous life forms I have seen have been human, reptilian, and a sort of duck-billed hedgehog type thing that curls up if you hassle it (a short-beaked echnida, apparently). Nothing bouncing on its back legs or ursinesque stuck up a gum tree...

In Sydney's quite good Museum of Australia, where there is a bit of a biodiversity theme, I learned the following Interesting Facts. There are more than 200 million insects for every human individual. In each square km of land there are 10 to the 10 (can't do superscipts - where's my HTML handbook) of the little blighters. Oz is one of 12 countries that are classed as megadiverse, the others being Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, India, Madagascar, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Congo (the only African one, interestingly) and another one that I missed. Between them, these countries have 75% of the planet's biodiversity (as measured by the number of species, I suppose). And I don't know how this could ever be verfied, but Oz boasts more reptile species in any given square km than there are in the whole of the British Isles. Cor blimey, mate!