Homepage
Twitter
Instagram
Email
NiteMode
DayMode
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.
•••

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
•••
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
•••
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
•••

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 15th, 2002
day-256_e-of-willare-bridge-rh-to-110k-e-of-broome-wa
Western Australia40km e of Willare Roadhouse to 110k e of Broome
99.3 km today
11964.43 km total
61.6 mi today
7417.6 mi total

Had a pretty easy ride to the Willare Bridge Roadhouse. We spent most of the day there piddling about, eating food, taking showers and such. I was working on this website on my pc and Grubby was doing some stuff on his pocket PC. Simon walked back to our table and said "oh, I got some new email!" A table of girls sitting next to us laughed. Oh well, can't be cool all the time. Talked to a few people and got ready to go. I had to get some clock pictures in front of this big sign of a policeman holding a radar gun.

We left around 4:00pm and figured we'd be doing some night riding otherwise we might not get to Broome the next day. Grubby and Simon hadn't ridden at night before but I told them it wasn't that big of a deal.

After about 20k of riding in the dark we pulled over to stretch and whatnot. All of the sudden there was this low droning noisy in the air. Looking back at the road I saw these blinking hazard lights coming towards us. We got out of the way and this car drove by us with no front tire. The pavement vibrated as they went past us...knocking over every single reflector post along the way. "Um, I can assure you that doesn't happen normally when you ride at night", I told Grubby and Simon. We rode on further and after getting around the corner we saw the car off the side of the road stuck in a ditch. We didn't really know what to make of the situation, was it a stolen car with some murderer in it? After we got closer we hear this two voices say "hey!" Turns out it was these two sk8 dudes about 18 years old. They were doing some work on a cattle station down the road. They had blown a tire and were trying to drive the 10k back to the station. The car had gone off the road and jumped when it hit a ditch. I took some pictures. They asked us to stop in at the houses about 10k down the road and say that "Bucko and Mushy fucked their car and need a ride". We kinda laughed at the whole situation and got moving.

Right before we got to the houses a car drove by and slowed down. Bucko and Mushy had gotten a ride so we didn't need to stop at the house.

After we hit the 100k mark we pulled over and camped in a gravel yard.

October 15th, 2002
99.3km
61.6mi