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 15th, 2002

day-287_exmouth-wa

Western Australia: Exmouth

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USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Today I went scuba diving again! I'm glad I had signed up for another two dives...cause this was probably the best day of all. Got some good photos and saw a lot of things I hadn't seen before, like sharks.

The first dive we were in the inflatable boat going out to one of the reefs. On the way out there we passed near what looked like a submerged reef. The guy driving the boat stopped the boat really fast...it was a huge manta ray. Didn't get to see the ray for too long though. The first dive was good, got some good photos and such...and ran out of air before anyone else...dang fast heart rate.

Driving around in the inflatable boat was kinda funny, I felt like at any moment we'd be landing on the shore...pulling our guns out and storming up the embankment, just like in the movies.

The second dive was off the pier. This was a pretty good dive. Came around to one part of the pier and there was this large reef shark sleeping on the bottom. Passed over him a couple times. They don't attack humans...for the most part from what I've heard at least. Got back up and had to pee badly. The guy on the boat said to just go over by the pier. Somehow I managed to get my wetsuit unzipped down to the middle of my chest with the BCD and tank still on. Due to my excellent giftage, I was able to "Get the hose" outside of the suit (up near my chest, really!) and pee in the water. Ahh, relief.

Back at the hostel I chit chatted with everyone, eventually getting a bunch of promised clock pictures. We were going to wait and get them in the daytime...but that never happened, so we settled for the mens bathroom instead.

November 15th, 2002

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