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 10th, 2002

day-190_cairns-australia

Queensland: Cairns

16 km today

7257.13 km total

9.9 mi today

4499.1 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Was going to leave town today but it ended up being another errand day. Mailed a bunch of crap home, got my bike in working order (bike shop gave me the wrong chain), and did some internet...by then it was 6pm. Looks like I wasn't going to be riding anywhere today. On the way back to Peter's house I saw a small tour bus at a stoplight. There was Japanese writing on the side, along with a driver and a tour guide standing up inside talking into a microphone. The guide was flailing her arms all about as she described Cairns into the microphone. Upon closer inspection I realized there was just one passenger in the bus (taking notes).

After another couple hours of "doing stuff" I watched this great program on Rock and Roll in Australia. Turns out that song I heard everyone singing too at the Palmer River Roadhouse was a song called "Am I ever going to see your face again?". After the singer sings the chorus, everyone in the crowd yells...."heck no, fuck off!" or something like that. Pretty catchy.

Yup, leaving tomorrow for the big trip west. Oh yeah, found out today that there is going to be a total solar clipse down in South Australia about the time I'm going to be there, that should be pretty cool if I can see it.

August 10th, 2002

16km

9.9mi