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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
August 15th, 2002
day-195_e-of-georgetown-to-w-of-georgetown-qld
Queenslandw of Mt. Suprise to w of Georgetown
118 km today
7760.13 km total
73.2 mi today
4811 mi total

Another good day of riding through the scrub. Met a couple by the Einasleigh River. Their son in law is a famous surfer named Tom. Had a good time riding throughout the morning. I stopped to put new batteries in my GPS. A car pulled up next to me to see if I needed any help. (this is pretty common out here, you stop, cars stop thinking you might be in trouble...this is good if I do get into a bungle somewhere). The guy and I got into an in-depth combination about video equipment. We agreed to meet up in Georgetown and he would do a quick interview of me on video. He asked if the bike was running good and I said yeah. After he left, I went to go and discovered that the rear tire was flat! Turns out I hit that cattle grate just a little too hard. I fixed the flat and pumped the tire back up. I was careful since it was a hot day about pumping it up too much. I went to go and the tire wouldn't move, the tube expanded and was pushing the tire back off the rim! I frantically found the valve and let a bunch of air out...seemed to be ok after that.

Got to Georgetown and spent some time there eating and talking to people The fruit and veggie stand seemed to be the hotbed of social gathering in the small town. Had a hard time debating about whether I should stay or not. I started riding, knowing that once I got far enough away from Georgetown...it would be too far to turn back. Later I was glad I kept riding, since I had a really nice ride on into the dark.

August 15th, 2002
118km
73.2mi