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

October 11th, 2002

day-252_fitzroy-crossing-wa

Western Australia: Fitzroy Crossing

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USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Had a relaxing morning and went to the store. Went to the footy oval and watched footy for most of the afternoon. As we were leaving, a bunch of tourists were slowly doing "drive bys." This is where they hear about a festival going on, so they go check it out and see nothing but Aboriginals around...so they keep driving. It was pretty funny to watch.

Ran into Simon on the street, he'd just pulled into town. We caught up on road gossip at the caravan park. I asked Simon if he found the porno magazine I stuck in a road drain...he did find it. ha ha.

Made up a bunch of food and couldn't really move after that. We did make it to the festival again. It was a lot quieter than last night. One band couldn't play because they had been drinking. A woman came up on the stage and was pretty bent out of shape about the ordeal. They were doing breathalyzer tests on the bands before they could play.

One of the bands that played last night was playing again tonight. They did their "Summer of 69" cover again. Then a few bands laster another band is playing and the second song they play is...."Summer of 69". Yes I got to hear that song twice in one night. (Bryan Adams was 12 in 1969 in case you were wondering)

October 11th, 2002

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