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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 28th, 2002
day-147_maryborough-to-childers-qld
QueenslandMaryborough to Childers
66 km today
4949.96 km total
40.9 mi today
3068.8 mi total

Today started out pretty nice and then sucked pretty bad, so things evened out.

Spent the morning farting around Maryborough. It was a nice town with a lot of old buildings and a very genuine feel to it. Got a couple good clock pics with the woodsman near the town entrance (see pics). Went to the bike shop, they didn't really have what I wanted. I bought one tire though to be on the safe side. This proved later to be a wise move. Didn't get out of town until about 11:30am. Was crusing along pretty good on the main highway. The sun was out and the shoulder was wide. Kaboom!, rear tire exploded. Looks like the tire I've been using since the start of the trip finally wore out. I put on my new one. This took forever because it is a Continental and they are a @#$@#R$ to put on when they are new. I kept pinching the tube, taking it back out to patch, and start the whole process over again. I stopped at a gas station near Howard for a cheer-up soda. A woman and her two kids stated talkign to me...I ended up getting a clock picture of them.

As I got closer to Childers, the road shoulder disappeared. Worse, the sun was going down right in front of me, making it hard for drivers to see anything. This had BAD written all over it I rode in the grass/gravel along side of the road at a slow pace. I hit a rock too hard and blew out my front tire. Fixed that and started crawling along again. Finally got into Childers. Just as I left the well lit store they closed it up and put up a sign reading "closing early due to power failure". At the carvan park now. At least tomorrow I don't have to ride on the damn highway, proably won't have to for a couple of days at least. Still dunno if I'm going to be in Rockhampton for my birthday.

June 28th, 2002
66km
40.9mi