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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 13th, 2002
day-132_casino-to-byron-bay
New South WalesCasino to Byron Bay
75.5 km today
4243.1 km total
46.8 mi today
2630.5 mi total

Finally got up before daylight this morning. Had to throw all my stuff out into the rugby field to pack it, too hard to pack in the brush. Made my coffee in the inzone and was off awhile later. Had a nice ride through the morning, except for hitting a rock square on with my front tire and getting a flat. Stopped at the bakery in Lismore. A guy saw that I was touring and asked me a few questions. After finding out that I was an American, he asked me about the whole September 11th thing. He said everyone down here seemed pretty concerned about it.

After Lismore the nice country road stayed just that, except the traffic increased 100-fold. I stopped to talk to a guy for awhile and we could barely hear each other. Eventually I made my way to Byron Bay. I went to the hostel and found out that the package of bike parts Kevin mailed to me was returned a day earlier...since they didn't think I was coming! More stuff to do down the line. Byron Bay is kind of nice, but it is full on marketed to the 18-30 crowd...so that gets to be a little much, at least net access is cheap. Going to stay at the Arts Factory hostel tomorrow, it looks a little more interesting than the one I'm at now.

June 13th, 2002
75.5km
46.8mi