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

July 5th, 2002

day-154_rockhampton-and-side-trip-to-emu-park

Queensland: Rockhampton / Emu Park

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5362.98 km total

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3324.9 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Spent the day roaming around Rockhampton and doing some writing for the clock site. Ran into a guy about 60 sitting on a park bench. "WHAT THE FUCK are you hauling all that shit around for?", he asked. We talked awhile. He pointed to one of my bags and asked what was in it...I told him clothes. "Why the hell don't you just buy them when you get to town at a second-hand store, what the hell are you carrying them for?" Somehow I couldn't get it though to him that it was not economically viable (or practical) to buy new clothes every second day for a year. He then proceeded to tell me about everything bad that happens in Australia, how bad Mackay was for drivers. This was bad, this will kill you, this is a bad idea, blah blah blah. Maybe Mr. Cobain met him in another life and wrote "Negative Creep" about him. I dubbed him the NC guy.

As I was walking around (the very warm I may add) Rockhampton. I walked past these three kids who were dressed like they were on the cover of an Eazy-E album. It had to have been about 85 degrees F, yet they were wearing heavy pants and giant puffy jackets in the the hood of Rockhampton. Amazing how kids suck up American Culture no matter how impractical it might be.

Met up with Duncan and we drove to Emu Park on the coast. Later Duncan, Alison and I went up to Yeppoon for yummy Thai Food!

July 5th, 2002

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