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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 21st, 2002
day-293_coral-bay-to-s-of-minilya-roadhouse-wa
Western AustraliaCoral Bay to s of Minilya Roadhouse
112.7 km today
13928.88 km total
69.9 mi today
8635.6 mi total

Headed out of Coral Bay. Rob and Co. were leaving later that afternoon so I figured I'd see them along the way, Rob said he'd bring me chocolate.

There was a lot less wind today, so the ride wasn't that bad. I got to the Tropic of Capricorn about 3pm. I crossed this on the East Coast around Rockhampton. My GPS had both crossings in the wrong spot. 23.5 degrees south was actually about 10km south of where the actual line was. Oh well, took a bunch of photos anyway...because everyone showed up when I was at the line. Good timing. I signed my name on the TOC line and put on my kilometerage. Said goodbye to everyone again, since I probably would see them until Perth.

Rest of the ride was pretty uneventful, except for the occaisional license plate finding. Had a burger at the roadhouse and wrote a couple letters. While I was outside eating, a dingo came up by me, not seeing me. He jumped when he saw me and did this spooky little scurry action away from me. He walked like he was on air or something, quick little springy steps. Anyway, that is the first dingo I've seen in the wild. I rode about another 20km, listeneing to Will Oldham's "I see a Darkness" album. Ended up pooping out and calling it a night.

November 21st, 2002
112.7km
69.9mi