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 18th, 2002

day-290_60km-n-of-coral-bay-to-coral-bay-wa

Western Australia: 62k n of Coral Bay to Coral Bay

62 km today

13816.18 km total

38.4 mi today

8565.7 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

The ride today was really tough, took me six hours to do a 3.5 hour ride. If this was a whiny travel site I'd spend a couple pages on how bad the wind was, but I'll just use the above sentence. Ran out of water and had to go into my "reserve" two liters which I've been carrying on the front of the bike for about 3 months now. It tasted like half the plastic bottle was now in the water. Thanks, but I'd rather dehydrate.

As I pulled into Coral Bay a tour bus was leaving. Everyone jumped over to the side of the bus and leaned out the window, cheering me on. This was nice. I remember how on the east coast oncoming drivers would just give you a look of disgust. "Flatlanders" as my friend Curtiss calls them.

Went to the Caravan park in Coral Bay. They manager guy was a nice guy, but pretty intense. He wanted me to go check out the site before I paid for it...to make sure it was what I wanted. It was right next to a big fence, thus blocking out all the wind.

Met this guy from Italy there who was heading down to South Australia to see the eclipse in a couple weeks time. He has been all over the world seeing eclipses. I gave him a license plate and he gave me a shell.

Rob and company should show up tomorrow.....

November 18th, 2002

62km

38.4mi