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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
September 20th, 2002
day-231_noonamah-to-35k-n-of-hayes-creek
Northern TerritoryNoonamah to 35k n of Hayes Creek
115.63 km today
10253.18 km total
71.7 mi today
6356.6 mi total

Headed out of Noonamah and on down south. Got to Adelaide River and stocked up on some food. I told the guy at the counter I was stocking up for a couple days. After he handed me back my change he said "That's not going to be enough food for two days..." Hmm, whatever...I guess he didn't know about all the food I already had. Went into the store where the bitchy woman was last week, turns out we weren't missing anything. Adelaide River was a nice town but I think the people experiences are going to drag it down in my memory though. A lot of small towns around here are like that, nice towns but the people don't seem that friendly. I know it isn't just me, I've talked to other people and they've had similiar experiences.

Talked to MCQ on the phone...turns out he is going to be in New Zealand about the time I'm going to be there, yay!

I headed down to the WWII cemetery, was probably one of the most kept up cemeteries I've ever seen. Headed down down the "scenic route" to Hayes Creek. It had more hills but no traffic whatsoevery. I rode onto a good part of the night and then "pissed off into the bush" as they say.

September 20th, 2002
115.63km
71.7mi