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

November 1st, 2002

day-273_port-hedland-wa

Western Australia: Port Hedland

0 km today

12714.93 km total

0.0 mi today

7883 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Spent the morning click clacking away at all the email I had piled up since June. Bless this little offline emailer...worth it's weight in gold. Had to stop doing email cause I was being to anti-social.... that's the one problem with this computer, I could easily get lost in a bazillion little projects... "it's bad! bad!" as George Bush Sr. would say.

Front tire actually had a thorn in it, so I did get a flat today.

Not too much else went on...got a few clock pics and started reading this book that I found at the hostel. "Chickenhawk", autobiography of a guy flying helicopters in Vietnam. I had somewhat of an interest in this since this is what my Uncle did in Vietnam.

Oh yeah, I thought about going down to Karijini NP on the little tour bus. Thought it might be a nice change of pace to take a side trip on one of the full blown backpacker tour buses where they cook for you and such. I didn't have the cash for the trip in my account, and when I checked my credit card balance...it was terribly high. Some fuc-head got my credit card number and bought about $1700 US worth of airline tickets on my credit card. Got that dealt with, but took it as a sign that I shouldn't be going on the trip, especially since I won't have a new credit card for a few days.

November 1st, 2002

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