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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 17th, 2002
day-197_40k-w-of-croydon-to-normanton-qld
Queenslandw of Croydon to Normanton
135 km today
8049.84 km total
83.7 mi today
4990.6 mi total

Woke up this morning and the confluence had moved a few meters. Took the photos for the confluence.org website and shoved off through the bush. Didn't get back on the highway till about 9:30am, which is kind of a late start. I like getting early starts because the spirits are better and you have a better feeling of accomplishment knowing that you have a fair amount of distance in by midday.

Ride was pretty uneventful, except for the fact of the flies. Flies everywhere! I only stopped twice the entire day, once at the Blackbull railway siding and another time up the road. The second time I stopped I made some lunch but the flies attacked me and my food. I kept on pushing to Normanton, figuring I'd get there around 5:30pm. Most people would wave at me which was nice. This stretch of road must be incredibly boring to drive in a car. So seeing a guy on a bike must be a nice change.

Got into Normanton around 5:30pm. Met some aboriginal kids on the street, they were on bikes asking me about my bike. One kid had on a Utah Jazz singlet. I pointed it out to him, he just asked me what "Utah" was.

Was very tired so I just checked into a motel. The woman pointed me where to go. She told me to watch out for the dog, "since he will bite." When I walked past the dog he would lunge out at me and his chain would stop him and his body would swing around.

Going to take tomorrow off...body needs a day off.

August 17th, 2002
135km
83.7mi