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 26th, 2002

day-237_65k-sw-of-katherine-to-35k-e-of-victoria-river

Northern Territory: 66k sw of Katherine to 35k e of River

103.69 km today

10608.32 km total

64.3 mi today

6576.8 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Actually started to rain early this morning about 4am so I had to get up and put the rainfly on, how rude...I was sleeping.

Morning was pretty uneventful overall. My deepest thought was wondering if the people who make Muesli/Granola bars actually have sort of police squad that goes around to places and seeing if stores are individual selling "not wrapped for individual sale" bars.

Stopped at 62mi rest stop. Day was getting hot so I decided to kill some time there, ended up being six hours! Met a couple travelling around, we seem to have a mutal interest in how bad the Northern Territory Newspaper is. Got a clock photo of them too. An older couple parked near me and they later invitied me over for tea. Here the conversations revolved around camping areas and how some you can't park a caravan vehicle at to easily.

I was getting ready to leave and another guy invited me over for a beer. Turns out he is one of the most interesting characters I've met in a long time. It was pretty much a one sided conversation that talked about such things as income tax brackets, anal sex, vehicle trouble, and cooking. Had a second beer with him and took off awhile later.

Rode on into the night. Came across a Wallaby that had just been hit by a road train a couple minutes before. Stopped around 11pm and made camp, followed by a lavish dinner of noodles with some whack pepper and cheese powder, yum.

A typical morning out in the bush, followed by some biking, and an nice sunset in 320x240 glory.

September 26th, 2002

103.69km

64.3mi