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 11th, 2002

day-283_s-of-nanutarra-roadhouse-to-30k-e-of-exmouth-turnoff

Western Australia: 56k southward to 30k e of Exmouth Turnoff

115.37 km today

13528.16 km total

71.5 mi today

8387.2 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Akk bundled up as I write this, the wind is a bit cold. I actually have my stocking cap on. Just a week or two ago I was riding at night with my shirt off because it was so hot and humid.

Got up right before my alarm went off. Unlike previous attempts at getting up early, I actually sat up this time and fumbled about. I stared at the stars a bit and the fell back asleep. Last night I heard a car go past and then slow down. I heard a slapping sound and thought maybe the driver hit a snake...I was to lazy to get up and see, anyway.

Left Simon a "present" on the side of the road when I headed out....maybe he will see it. The morning was really long, pushing into a headwind for the first 4-5 hours. Eventually reached the turnoff to the coast, and that gave me a bit of a tailwind..suddenly my speed was double. Took a nap under a tree and pushed onward.

Broke a spoke on my new rear wheel, argh. I told them I wanted the heavy guage spokes when I was having the wheel built, but they put on normal ones.

Also realized that today I didn't speak to one single person, not by choice, but that is just the way it worked out. Nobody stopped to say hellow or see if I needed anything, weird.

Still dunno if I'm going to go up to Exmouth, it is 170k or so out of the way, but I do have a couple packages waiting there for me...and Grubby emailed me and told me he watched turtles humping on the beach, so maybe I should go.

November 11th, 2002

115.37km

71.5mi