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 30th, 2002

day-271_sandfire-roadhouse-to-45k-e-of-port-hedland

Western Australia: 30k sw of Pardoo Roadhouse to 45k e of Port Hedland

89.79 km today

12654.33 km total

55.7 mi today

7845.4 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Was a little harder going today since there was a bit of a headwind and I was a bit tired from yesterday's long ride. Woke up late and rode until about 12:30pm. It was getting really hot and somewhat humid. I kept looking for a culvert that was larger in size and didn't have any dead animals nearby. Eventually I found one. Spent about 5 hours in there writing email, reading, eating, and sleeping. At one point I went to do a #2 in view of the road. To go to someplace out of view from the road would have been quite a walk...plus no cars had came by. Just as I was wrapping things up, a car came. I know they saw me pulling my shorts up. So I did the only thing I could do, smile at them and wave really big.

Got going around sunset. Stopped at the railroad crossing to take a break and maybe get a nighttime photo of the train going by. The train did come by just as I was leaving. I was quite tired and made it another 10k or so before falling asleep and camping in the bush.

October 30th, 2002

89.79km

55.7mi