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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 28th, 2002
day-208_cape-crawford-to-130k-e-of-hiway-roadhouse
Northern TerritoryCape Crawford to 130k e of HiWay Roadhouse
140 km today
9069.54 km total
86.8 mi today
5622.8 mi total

Had a hard time getting motivated today, mostly because I stayed up late the previous night and was a little sleepy this morning.

Ran into a guy who I saw in the Caravan Park in Borroloola. He is a sign maker and just got done with a stint in Borroloola. He said he was pretty impressed with how fast they made decisions in that town. There is a town down south where they are wanting to build a three-story outhouse, it has taken 10 years and nothing has happened because there are too many negative people dragging things down.. He said that in Borroloola, they were thinking about making signs to put out on the highway at the turnoff 270k away. Within two weeks they had all the stuff ordered from Darwin and this guy made the signs, and he was now on his way to go put them up. He laughed they would have gotten it done sooner, but there was a rodeo or something that they had to take care of first. Anyway, he was listening to Johnny Cash on the radio. "Folsom Prison Blues" came on and I kinda looked into his car. "JC got going there...and that isn't Jesus Christ". The guy referred to Johnny as JC throughout our conversation. He gave me a two liter of Pepsi and drove off.

I reached the first rest area, ended up spending about three hours there eating and taking a nap. Met a guy named Ian and we had a good time busting funnies with each other. By sunset I had only gone about 100k, enough for a normal days ride...but I didn't have as much food with me and needed to go at least 140k otherwise I wouldn't make it to the next roadhouse in time. Made dinner and loaded up some new tunes on the mp3 player...and rolled off into the night.

It was a nice three hour ride in the dark, listening to Townes Van Zandt and Tom Waits. I can't really listen to slower music in the daytime, but somehow it works better at night. Saw only a couple of cars. I would get off the road when I saw them coming, they must have thought it was quite odd to see some random guy on a pushie at 1am in the middle of nowhere.

Got tired and pulled off the road and was asleep pretty quick.

August 28th, 2002
140km
86.8mi