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 30th, 2002

day-302_northampton-to-greenough-wa

Western Australia: Northampton to Greenough

85.33 km today

14589.75 km total

52.9 mi today

9045.3 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

So now you all are wondering what the heck is going on with the stolen money. Well it turns out Bugs Meany took it to by food for some homeless people, but Encyclopedia Brown saved the day. Actually I dunno what happened. I talked to the other guy staying there (he was about 60 or so). The cops searched his room too. So who knows. This is the second time this has happned to me this trip though.

Ride was pretty average to Geraldton. Still can't get over how the bush just ended, now it is the land of fresh food, strong FM radio signals, and no ability to camp wherever I feel like it. I was trying to get to town before both bike stores closed. By 1:30pm one of them was closed, but I went to the other one. They had a tire but hardly any 700c tubes. This is definetly the last time I tour on 700c wheels. As I was getting ready to leave, another one of the guys who worked there started talking to me. He offered me a coffee. I ended up getting a clock pic with a few of the guys in front of the bike shop. We went down the street and had some more coffee. (Thanks again for the coffee Jeff!) Jeff told me that there was a caravan park about 30km out of town, which sounded perfect.

Had a pretty normal ride (by normal I now mean into the usual strong headwind) to the caravan park. On Triple-J radio they had the Daniel guy from Silverchair in the studio. He was talking and playing a bunch of his favorite records...good stuff too, a lot of King Crimson, Captain Beefheart, Velvets, and Frank Zappa.

Got to the carvan park as the sun was going down. The guy running it is a dead ringer for my ex-next-door neighbor Mr. Kliphouse (in about another 15 years).

This wind is cold, I'm going to bed.

November 30th, 2002

85.33km

52.9mi