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 8th, 2002

day-157_rockhampton-to-marlborough

Queensland: Emu Park to Marlborough

112 km today

5482.98 km total

69.4 mi today

3399.3 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Duncan and Alison made us a big fat breakfast, yummy. We all said our goodbyes and I rode with Duncan back to Rockhampton. Got the vegemite contest online and proceeded to head out of town. As I was going through the town square, I ran into NC Guy (see Friday's entry). "Still here!....why the hell don't you just go to the op-shop (second hand store) and buy some clothes there instead of carrying them?" He kind of scoffed when I said it didn't make sense to buy new clothes every day. He was actually starting to annoy me a bit...but soon left.

On the way out I got photos of these cows that are near the entrances to Rockhampton. For the longest time people kept stealing the male cows "privates". Rumor has it that the city maintenance worker carries around a bunch of extra fiberglass "units" in case they get stolen. The cow I took pictures of had his unit bolted to the concrete, so it didn't look like it was going anywhere anytime soon.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. Finally starting to get into the feeling of the outback just a little...in that the distances between towns is becoming significantly greater. People up here in Queensland are the friendliest people I've met so far in Australia. A lot of people honk and wave...how cool.

July 8th, 2002

112km

69.4mi