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

August 6th, 2002

day-186_cairns-qld-pacific-ocean

Queensland: Pacific Ocean

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USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Took the scuba test today, wasn't that hard...though I did get annoyed with all of the "all of the above" questions. We went down to the marina and headed out to the ocean. The guy said people were bound to get sick since it was going to be a very rough ride out to the main boat. I took three ginger pills before we left, so I think that held everything inside of me. I was talking to one guy and all of the sudden I noticed the guy sitting next to him puking his guts out into the trash can. The guy who I was talking to was oblivious to what was going on. He eventually found out the hard way though, since some of the debris ended up on him. The boat turned into Pukefestaplooza 2002. We got to the main boat about 1.5 hours later.

Went out for our first dive, I got down about 8 feet or so and my ears wouldn't equalize. No matter how hard I tried going up and back down, they wouldn't pop. Argh. I ended up having to go back up. I was a bit worried about being out here and not being able to go down in the water. I took a bunch of decongestant and that seemed to work, because on the second dive I was able to go all the way down to about 50 feet underwater...which was where the ocean floor was at that point. Was kind of surreal being down that deep. We did some training things down there and came back up. Tomorrow is the last of the exercises and then we are on our own.

August 6th, 2002

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