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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
July 20th, 2002
day-169_tully-to-gordonvale
QueenslandTully to Gordonvale
122 km today
6532.08 km total
75.6 mi today
4049.7 mi total

Must have got about 1.234 hours of sleep last night. The hostel was pretty rowdy. Not that I'm not into that sort of thing, but after riding all day and then chasing the night down with umpteen beers, I was pretty tired. The rest of the people from the hostel slowly filed in throughout the night...making all kinds of noise in the process. A bunch of girls outside were singing all the hits of the Beatles, etc. Well, they were just singing the choruses of all the songs, they didn't know any of the verses. "Can't buy me looooovee, can't buy me looooveeee...da da da da da da can't buy me looo hove"

I didn't get out of the hostel until about 10am.

Was tired and a bit hungover so my motivation wasn't running to high. Couldn't find any decent tunes on the radio to help matters out. Got to Innisfail and stopped at the park for lunch. There were some dodgy guys at the table near me...eventually they yelled over to me asking me where I was going . I went over and talked to them. They were all pretty drunk and both of them were having conversations with me at the same time, each unaware of their friend's conversation with me. A third guy showed up after a McDonalds run. He was all pissed off about the

"cashier stunt" (well, not stunt, but the word he used rhymes with it). I wish I could have had a recording of their conversation, I was trying to not bust out laughing. It kept jumping from unwanted lettuce on the burger to stolen car stereos.

Rode the rest of the day and got into Gordonvale close to dark. Went to the grocery store and got food and asked about caravan parks. Turns out there wasn't any in town. Just as I was getting to my bike outside, a couple guys pulled up on bikes...then I realized that they were touring. Turns out they were camping near a farmers field a little bit away, so I decided to join them for the night. They were from Austraia, had gone on the Trans-Siberian railway to SE Asia and then through Thailand and Laos to Darwin. Then drove from Darwin to Cairns. Anyway, we biked out through the sugarcane fields to this patch of flat grass near the city sewer. At least we were upwind. Had a nice talk with them during dinner and we all turned in since it started raining.

July 20th, 2002
122km
75.6mi