Welcome to Asia

Location:

Asia is the world’s largest continent and also the most populated, situated between the Pacific Ocean with its seas in east, the Indian Ocean with its seas in south, the Arctic Ocean with its seas in north and Ural Mountains, Ural River, Caspian Sea, Caucasus and the Middle East in west (normally the Middle East and the Little Asia are included in Asia but we describe them separately).

Area/Surface:

38.900.000 km²

Population:

3.934.016.000 people

The biggest cities:

Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing, Bombay, New Delhi, Jakarta, Osaka, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and others

Languages spoken:

Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, Urdu, Hindi, English, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Khmer, Lao, Tagalog, Malay and many other hundreds of dialects and languages

Time zone:

+2 hours to +12 hours Greenwich time

Asia

Asia seas:

Asia is by far, the number one as surface and also as population among the continents and is home for more than 60% of the world’s population. The northern seas that border the continent are: Kara, Laptev, Eastern Siberia, Chukchi and Bering. The eastern seas are: Okhotsk, Japan, Yellow, Eastern China, Philippines, Southern China, Sulawesi and Arafura and the southern seas are: Timor, Andaman, Bengal Gulf and Thailand Gulf and the Arabian Sea.

Relief:

The relief of this huge continent is varied starting from the large frozen plains of Siberia or the large plain in the east of China, to the plateau areas like the Deccan Plateau in India or the better known Tibet Plateau in China which is the world’s highest plateau, then culminating with some of the world’s highest mountain chains like Tian Shan, Kunlun Shan, Hindu Kush Mountains and the more important Himalaya Mountains that have the world’s highest elevation in the Everest peak of 8.848 m height. Of course that the desert areas are not absent and are represented by the Gobi Desert in Mongolia and China, the Thar Desert in Pakistan and India or the Taklimakan Desert in the north-west of China.

Climate of Asia:

Asian climate is also varied according with the region, location and elevation. In the north of the continent, the cold Siberia has low temperatures like the high mountains covered with a layer of ice and snow. Going to the south of the continent, the climate becomes temperate, then it passes through all the possible types of clime in the end becoming tropical, wet and hot in the South and South-East parts where are two seasons, the rainy and dry ones with the monsoons presence in the rainy season. The rainfall also varies between 150 mm in the desert areas and more than 3.000 mm per year in the tropical area.

Fauna and flora, rivers and lakes and resources:

The Asian fauna and flora are very diversified with thousands of species of plants and animals, some of them endangered with the extinction. (Find more journeys on blog.worldlifetimejourneys.com) The longest and most important Asian rivers are: Chang Jiang, Amur, Mekong, Indus, Ganges, Huang He, Obi, Yenisei, Lena, Salween and others. Among the largest and most important Asian lakes are: Baikal, Balkhash, Aral and others. Many of the territories are uninhabited, however China and India are the world’s most populated countries with a third of the total population of the planet. There are very important resources of coal, oil and natural gas. The countries that compound this continent (except the Middle East and Russia which is described in Europe) are: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kirghizstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Maldives, China, Taiwan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, East Timor and Philippines. Visit Asia!