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Biking Around Australia

Between February 2002 and March 2003 I circumnavigated 12,504 miles around the Australian continent on my bicycle, or push bike as they say there. After that I went to New Zealand for three months and met up with a friend and ended up pushing the total mileage to 14,115.7 miles (22717.02 km). I spent 269 days on my bike, 272 days not on my bike, and getting 67 flat tires over those 17 months.

This is the route I took around Australia. Every few days I would update this YHA map with a marker and the route I more or less made up as I went along.
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I started and ended my 13 month lap around Australia at Luna Park in St. Kilda/Melbourne.. The distance around Australia (including Tasmania) ended up being about 20,281km (12,600 miles).

February 12th, 2002 - 3:50pm
March 12th, 2003 - 3:12pm
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I carried a 15 pound IBM Thinkpad 600E with five batteries over the course of the entire trip in order to keep this website updated on a weekly basis so people back home could follow me on my travels. I had a system setup where I'd back the photos up to CDs and mail them home every few weeks. To update the site, I primarily did it with 3.5 inch floppy disks. There are 542 daily journal entries on here. I redid the website in 2020 so it would show up on phones and such ok. I took 36,304 photos over the 17 months and 12321 of them ended up here on this website. As for the words, there are 119527 of them for you to read. I didn't start active journaling until a couple months into the journey. I've noted where I've added journal entries way after the fact based on recollections or notes I had from the time. Some people have actually read the the entire site and have seen every picture. Some entries were written the same day, others were not. Some entires are a thought-provoking and a wholly entertaining read, others are downright boring.
Lunky.com website 2001-2020


The MS Paint image I updated every few days
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Also during the journey I carried a cardboard "clock" for this website I had started a year earlier called The Human Clock. Here it is on the Queensland/Northern Territory border
The Human Clock website was pretty popular then and it plus my bike trip got a quick blurb in the Sunday Times of London in September of 2002
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One fun thing I did during my trip was to visit six "confluences", which is where a whole-numbered latitude/longitude mark intersects for The Degree Confluence Project.

This was also back when the GPS looked nice
Standing at 18°S 142°E
Thanks for reading!
Craig
June 30th, 2003
day-514_wellington-new-zealand
New ZealandWellington
0 km today
22185.52 km total
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13759.4 mi total

Got up this morning and nerded out on one of the computers. I was next to the hostel room with the one double bed. I was typing away when the cleaning guy went in. He looked around, then picked up the wastebasket to empty it. "Hmm", looking in it, "No question as to what they were up to last night, I knew they weren't playing monopoly!". I indicated that Monopoly did have a jail, so if they used their imagination maybe they could have been playing a version of strip monopoly or something.

Walked around town today, had to mail some stuff to Wanaka and Okarito. My package from myself that Robin mailed to me arrived, yay, more crap to haul home. Walked around Cuba street a bit, nice to be somewhere unique, well, unique when you compare it to a suburban shopping center.

I took one photo of a sign concerning someone selling a bunch of records. Right as I was taking it a kid walked by me and said "oh hey!, you like my sign huh?". I said that I did and he seemed pretty happy.

A bunch of people from the hostel were going gokarting. 25 bucks for 25 minutes, seemed like a good time. It took us awhile to find the place but we got there. The go-karting was a lot of fun and worth every penny. I was trying to film and drive at the same time but that didn't work out too well. I didn't want one of the people who worked there to see me and make me stop or something. The karts were pretty fast. They have these radios on them so if there is a potential crash situation coming up, the race guys can hit a button and slow everyone's car down. The cars are all computerized so you get your exact lap times and see who came in where. I came in the middle, mostly cause I was fumbling around with the camera for about 5 minutes so I couldn't drive a-g-g-r-e-s-s-i-v-e. Back at the hostel, like an hour later, people were still analyzing the race results, it was kida funny. My clothes reek of gas fumes, for once I'd rather smell like cigarette smoke!

We got back to the hos

June 30th, 2003
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