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 24th, 2002

day-296_s-of-carnarvon-to-wooramel-roadhouse

Western Australia: 30k s of Carnarvon to Wooramel Roadhouse

92.7 km today

14190.31 km total

57.5 mi today

8797.7 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Last night was a long one. After the snake episode, the rain episode followed. I didn't have the rainfly on my tent since rain hasn't been an issue. I started feeling rain about 2am, so I got up and went outside to cover up everything. Running around naked in the rain with non-stop "ahh's" as a zillion thorns kept sticking into my feet.

Didn't get going until 10:30am. Had to fix my other tire since it was flat. Pushing the bike all around yesterday looking for a place to camp wasn't the best idea. Everything is so dry. Ants were all over everything too. This bush camp sucked! Even worse is that I couldn't get Bob Seger's "Turn th Page" out of my head.

Got going and there was a strong headwind. I crept along at about 10km /hr for most of the day. Only fun part was finding about five license plates along the way, Christmas gifts should be covered now. Had to actually put on my rain jacket and stocking cap, since it was cold for a change. A younger couple stopped and talked to me for awhile, they said Simon was about 10km ahead...so I figured I'd see him at the roadhouse. I continued on and saw a couple wild kitty cats running across the road. It was a little creepy actually to see "wild" cats running around in the bush.

Reached the roadhouse about 9:30pm, it was closed. I went across the road and camped, unloading the bike on the road and carrying all the crap to camp.

November 24th, 2002

92.7km

57.5mi