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 8th, 2002

day-280_40k-w-of-karratha-to-30k-w-of-fortescue-roadhouse-wa

Western Australia: 40k w of Karratha to 30k w of Fortescue Roadhouse

105 km today

13219.13 km total

65.1 mi today

8195.6 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Did the old wake up early, take a couple pictures...then fall back asleep bit.

Had a pretty uneventful morning. About 15k from the roadhouse an oncoming car slowed down, the guy reached out and handed me a bottle of coke. I thanked him...he said it looked like I needed it.

Stopped for a second to get some water and a kangaroo came jumping out from under a drain culvert. It bounded along...then at the apex of the bounce..caught a fence and flopped over face-first into the ground. I laughed as it got back up...shook it off...then kept bounding away. It was such a graceful fall I couldn't help but laughing.

My mind starting thinking about all differnt sorts of things that have happened on the trip...like running into various sorts of pushy religious people. By pushy I mean the arrogant types who shove literature in your face and act like their religion is the "one true religion". As I was thinking about this and higher forces, my rear tire blew apart. So it was either one of these "higher forces" that blew it apart, or the fact that I'd been running on the same tire for the last 5,000k and it finally gave out. ha ha.

I reached the roadhouse and spent awhile there eating, reading, and sleeping. The woman at the roadhouse had met both Chris (the guy I met riding south of Cooktown), and the Japanese guy I've been chasing since east of Melbourne.

Rode on into the night, started getting tired and stopped...I can't ride to well when I'm tired.

November 8th, 2002

105km

65.1mi