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 13th, 2002

day-193_50k-ne-of-mt-garnet-to-30k-w-of-mt-garnet

Queensland: somewhere north of Mt. Garnet to 30k w of Mt Garnet

85 km today

7517.13 km total

52.7 mi today

4660.3 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Didn't get as far as I planned today. Got up early, but it took a long while to get off the dirt road and back onto the pacement. It was still a pretty good drop, but a lot of up and downs. Was riding along and suddenly it got really hard to pedal. Turns out the bolt broke on my rear rack. Great, this will be today's broken part saga. Was able to get everything back together and moved on. Got to the paced road...figured that by taking the dirt road it put me about 1/2 a day behind. The rack kept rubbing a little and I let out a scream of frustration, tired of the bike falling apart. Just annoying more than anything.

Got to Innot Hot Springs which was basically a bar and a caravan park. A girl out front of the bar started talking to me and gave me a free beer. I waiting around for lunch to be served at noon. As I waiting I stripped the rack back off and beat the living crap out of it to bend it so it wouldn't hit my brake and/or tire.

Bar was pretty cool, I even got a clock picture there. Which I could have stayed since they were a nice bunch of people, but I wanted to keep moving on a little.

Got to Mt. Garnet, ran into a couple German guys in front of the tore who were touring. Talked to them a little and went in and bought some food. The store had a little bit of everything, food, sewing supplies, auto supplies...you name it.

The ride past Mt. Garnet was really nice, what I've been waiting for for a long long time....big stretches of nothing! Found a place to camp off the side of the road, would be nice if it could be like this every night.

August 13th, 2002

85km

52.7mi