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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 22nd, 2002
day-171_cairns-qld
QueenslandCairns to Cairns
21.5 km today
6585.58 km total
13.3 mi today
4082.8 mi total

Now I'm back in my tent at the hostel...cool. The YHA had my 4th and final package. The woman asked if I was their post office, yeah...but they didn't have any room so I couldn't stay there dangit.

Day was pretty stressfull, running all around town trying to find a new bite valve for my MSR dromedary bag. Gave up and decided to throw money at the problem and buy a full blown camelback. The upside is that I'll drink more water. Even had to go to the MALL today to dry and get a map of the top end. Everything closes down at 5:30pm in the mall except on Thursdays, where it is open until 9:00pm. How un-american! The bookstore I went to didn't have the map I wanted but by the time I made it to the other one they were closed, yet I could see the map I needed in the dang windown. Now I have to go back there tomorrow. The grocery store was a zoo, I was getting annoyed with people getting in my way. I bought chips and salsa and beer as a stress relief. Glad I had it cause when I got back to the hostel I discovered that my battery charger was no longer working. I'd love to throttle the punk who stole mine from the Caravan Park in Bli Bli on the Sunshine Coast. I ordered it on the net a couple weeks ago and had it sent to my parents house and they sent it to me...and it doesn't work. I thought about throwing anything I had with a computer chip into the trash, but decided things would be working sometime soon. The PCT was a lot different in that I wasn't carrying all this techie stuff...then again, I was hardly ever in towns on the PCT...so being out west will change my perspective a great deal. Every time I get into town I keep remembering something that is broken or screwed up that needs to be fixed...gets annoying after awhile. Hopefully will make it out of town tomorrow, but I might just take it easy for a change also.

July 22nd, 2002
21.5km
13.3mi