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 19th, 2002

day-199_normanton-to-120k-e-of-burketown

Queensland: Normanton to 120k e of Burketown

99 km today

8148.84 km total

61.4 mi today

5052 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Could hardly sleep at all last night. Tent was really hot and people on the street were noisy. Seemed to be a fight or argument going on. That said, I didn't get up and going until about 7:30am. Picked up a couple things from the store and got moving. Had a real hard time getting motivated, think it was the lack of sleep and my bad breakfast...cookies.

Got to Burke and Wills camp #119 and made some lunch and took a nap. This is the last camp that Burke and Wills made on their expiedition to the Gulf. They died on the way back. I felt a lot better after laying down for awhile and mozeyed down the road.

The ride was pretty normal today, bike handled alright. Got one snakebite flat on some hard ruts. Found a place to camp in the trees. Had been listening to public radio (only station out here) and they mentioned about Australians fire fighting in Oregon. I kept the radio on for the story, it was kind of wierd to hear them talk about the Siskiyou National Forest and such.

Might make it to Burketown tomorrow, might not.

August 19th, 2002

99km

61.4mi