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

January 10th, 2003

day-343_blackwood-river-to-carey-creek

Western Australia: Blackwood River to Carey Creek

85 km today

15589.73 km total

52.7 mi today

9665.3 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

spent most of the morning clacking away on the laptop in the tent...getting the travel site up to date. Good thing I have five batteries with me, although I'm on the last of the five. It was good to get everything caught up, though I'm probably forgetting some details of the stay in Perth.

Got on the road around 11am. Stopped at the store about 5km up the road. This is the second store in Australia that wouldn't just give me water...had to buy it. It hasn't been raining lately. I'm not complaining...but I thought I'd have water trouble out near the Great Sandy Desert...not here. Sat on hold for 30 minutes with my credit card company, only to find out the fraud department had just closed. Fuggers. Called Maree (hi!). Ended up getting some food and didn't get going till nearly 1pm.

The ride was nice the whole day. I took a long gravel backroad most of the day. Realized I wouldn't get to Pemberton before dark so I just hung it up here. Had to look around for awhile to find a decent spot to camp before darkness set in...kinda like a dog spending 10 minutes looking for a spot to pee. Gotta run, there is one of those Quokka things running around my camp, (s)he got so close I had to use the macro setting on my camera.

January 10th, 2003

85km

52.7mi