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 22nd, 2002

day-233_60k-n-of-katherine-to-katherine-nt

Northern Territory: 25k s of Pine Creek to Katherine

72.21 km today

10438.13 km total

44.8 mi today

6471.3 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Got up and going and had a pretty fast ride into Katherine. Watched the sunrise from my tent rather than riding on the road.

Found a great display of a bunch of Jim Beam and cola cans stuck on top of all the brush. Got into Katherine and stopped at the hostel. As I was getting ready to check in I heard someone say "Craig!". It was Jeff of Sydney fame). He is travelling Australia now too and I didn't know exactly where he was.

Spent the rest of the afternoon in the pool and doing odds and ends. My laptop came back to the hostel. Upon firing it up it crashed again, looks like they didn't give me new memory chips. I pulled one of them and it booted up ok. If only I had thought of this sooner I could have saved a lot of trouble, oh well.

Jeff and I had dinner at the take away place where Stuart and I ate a couple weeks ago. I thought that the 40 minute wait a couple weeks ago was just a fluke...turns out it must be normal practice. Went to the Katherine Hot Springs. They weren't really hot, but it was kind of nice to swim in at night. This place is mentioned a couple times in Phil O'Brien's "101 Adventures that got Me Nowhere" books...seems he took a few girls and beers here.

September 22nd, 2002

72.21km

44.8mi