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 3rd, 2002

day-275_60k-sw-of-port-hedland-to-30k-e-of-roebourne-wa

Western Australia: 60k sw of PH to 30k e of Roebourne

115 km today

12903.13 km total

71.3 mi today

7999.7 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Pretty normal day today. Starting to see hills again, yay! Got to Whim Creek about 11:00am. It is just a nice little pub there...that has been blown over by cyclones a few zillion times. The last cyclone that came through lasted for 22 hours and they owners and everyone else huddled into a metal shipping container for safety. The walls were filled with photos...including ones of a beer drinking camel. Since this roadhouse was a little more touristy...it meant that there were a lot of tourists around asking the same dang questions. By this I mean that they don't get out enough. My friend Kevin was telling me that when he was riding to Burning Man in the states, everyone was cheering him on. Out here they act like you are nuts and you should be driving. Argh.

A couple heading east said that this was the nicest roadhouse they had been to in awhile, the others had been kind of a dump. yay! This means they will be good.

I took off about 4:00pm and rode into the night. Ended up going about 15k farther than I planned since I couldn't find anywhere decent to camp. Well, I did find a spot around the 100k mark in these trees...but the place was really creepy. I keep thinking how in that book "Tracks" about the woman saying she camped in the desert and kept having horrible dreams all night. When she got to the next town she was telling someone about her dreams the other night. The person asked where she camped and she told them. The person said "oh sheesh, that place is haunted...you shouldn't have camped there!"

November 3rd, 2002

115km

71.3mi