Homepage
Twitter
Instagram
Email
NiteMode
DayMode
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.
•••

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
•••
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
•••
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
•••

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 23rd, 2002
day-295_carnarvon-to-30k-s-of-carnarvon
Western AustraliaCarnarvon to 30k s of Carnarvon
35 km today
14097.61 km total
21.7 mi today
8740.2 mi total

I'm sitting in the bush, and the dang ants are crawling all around the screen. I don't see them until they walk on the text areas with the white background on my screen.

Woke up at around 6 am. I looked at the guy in the top bunk next to me, there was a giant watermelon next to him in his bed. I think someone was playing a joke.

Talked on da phone for quite a while. Funny how it costs about 4-5x more to call somewhere in Australia as it does to call to the US. Dad talked to me on the phone while cutting sheetrock, and I thought I was cool just cause I could write code and talk on the phone at the same time.

Made a pass by the supermarket and drugstore. The drugstore actually had 5.25inch 1.2meg floppy disks...the disks that put the "floppy" in floppy. (Well, actually the 8inch ones were first...160k per side..whoo hoo!). They had about 100 boxes of these disks, all marked down to !10.95. I just bought the 3.5 inch ones.

I decided to just pack up and leave. I didn't feel like sitting on my butt all day, plus the hostel was a bit gloomy. When I got back to the hostel Simon was packing up. He was kinda feeling the same way I was, the woman running the hostel was a bit grumpy. I felt like if I stayed one minute past 10:00am she'd charge me the day rate. When I took my sheet back she said I needed to leave since it was 10:00am. I threw all my stuff outside where Simon was and packed outside.

Blew outta town and met Simon up the road near the big Satellite dish. We went up there and took a few photos. He was going back to the gas station to write a few emails, so I took off down the road. The wind was blowing kinda hard and I was kinda tired. It was kind of nice actually to take the day off "on the road". By this I mean not having to really plan on making any distance. Found a couple license plates on the side of the road.

Pulled off the road into the bush. I kept going around here in there looking for a decent spot to camp. This one was too windy, this one had cow bones, this one had a big spider, this one was too close to the road.

After walking around here barefoot for awhile and getting stuck in the foot a bunch by these dry thorns, I expected a flat tire...sure enough, my front one had about 300 thorns in it. Back one hasn't gone flat yet despite pulling a bunch of thorns from it. You get what you deserve as the Big Star song goes...time to start carrying the bike around in the bush again.

Ok...not done yet. I'm writing up the captions for the photos below and I feel something on my foot, dang ants were back. (they've been crawling on me in droves every couple of hours or so). I flicked them away but as I looked down I discovered it was a small snake! ACK! ACK! YIKES!

November 23rd, 2002
35km
21.7mi