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 13th, 2002

day-254_fitzroy-crossing-to-93k-w-of-fc-wa

Western Australia: Fitzroy Crossing to 93k w of FC

106 km today

11766.13 km total

65.7 mi today

7294.6 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

All three of us rolled out of town, stopping by the gas station for some last minute junk food. Grubby bought a "That's Life" magazine, oh dear. Now he can read tales of best friends stealing their mate's wife and tips on using a pizza cutter to cut herbs.

Most of the ride was pretty uneventful. I did find this toy policeman on the side of the road, that was pretty cool. The other side of my rack broke so I had to stop and wrap a brake cable around the two welds to hold it together.

Today is my sister Teresa's birthday. Happy Birthday T.!

We crossed the 129e meridan and thought it would be fun to take pictures of the geographic confluence about 3k south of the road. Eventually we found a road that headed south. After dropping all our stuff we biked about 3k down the dirt road and dumped the bikes. It was about a 2k walk to the confluence point. We took the pictures....Simon and Grubby just lost their confluencial virginity.

Back out on the highway we biked until we reached this "Bird Sanctuary." Which was basically this large mudhole with a lot of birds around. Wish Simon would hurry up and finish the "That's Life" magazine so I can read it. (There is a juicy tip in there about melting down all your lipstick and making a new color), Quite a different change of pace from reading "Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee"...which I'm almost finished with.

October 13th, 2002

106km

65.7mi