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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 31st, 2002
day-211_larrimah-to-matarranka-nt
Northern TerritoryLarrimah to Matarranka
77.5 km today
9381.54 km total
48.0 mi today
5816.2 mi total

Went the 1k back into Larrimah and up to the scone place. It was basically just a womans house. I went in and she asked what I wanted without really knowing what she had for sale. Good scones.

Sat around the store eating breakfast and reading the Darwin paper. Another cyclist rolled in, ended up talking to him for a couple hours. His name was Stuart and he was biking from the easternmost point of Australia to the westernmost point. We ended up going over to the WWII museum and then decided to bike together north.

Funny how much faster one can go when you are biking with someone else, wasn't a competetion thing or anything, it's just that you tend to doddle less.

We reached Mataranka in the early evening. Ate dinner at the pub, they were having a lamb BBQ. They pawned it off like it was going to be this huge deal, but there were not a lot of people there. The guy wouldn't let us have seconds. Don't know what they were going to do with all the extra food, probably let it get a few days older and make it into a dodgy stew as Monday night's special. I've heard that this is common, stuff that doesn't sell at pubs becomes the Monday night special. For a Saturday night, Mataranka wasn't that happening of a place.

The caravan park we were staying out was, er, a dump, literally. Had nice sheet metal fencing, 3 inch deep bulldust dirt, dog poop, and a crappy trailer that served as the showers. I think I was actually cleaner than the shower.

August 31st, 2002
77.5km
48.0mi