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 11th, 2003

day-344_25km-w-of-pemberton-to-pemberton-wa

Western Australia: Carey Creek to Pemberton

35.26 km today

15624.99 km total

21.9 mi today

9687.2 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Made a yummy breakfast of pasta and tunafish. Heck with this oatmeal stuff, that does nothing for me except feeling hungry 11 minutes later.

So it turns out these woods weren't as woodsy as I thought, not 5km from where I camped was this big posh resort. It was more posh than Posh Spice. Went in there to get something to drink from the shop. Felt a little out of place being dirty and body-not-seen-hot-water in four days. I did put my hat on...so they couldn't see my greasy hair.

Reached Pemberton...bought a bunch of food. The hostel is 10km back out of town....part of which I road already. It was a nice ride though. The hostel was pretty cool, little houses and stuff all over, and a pen with some kangaroos in it that had been resuced when they were young joeys. Had to wait around a couple hours till the office opened again. Hung out in the BBQ area...goodd thing because the sky opened up and the rain came down. Aparently it hasn't rained in awhile here...so everyone seemed pretty stoked on it.

Met this guy from the Netherlands...we talked politics and he said he had rented the Mel Gibson movie "We were soldiers"...so we watched that. The tv/vcr was in the BBQ hut, so towards the end of the movie a backpacker tour bus pulled up. They were making all kinds of noise and I freakin' hate background noise during a movie. (Asked that guy I screamed at to shut up during a Richard Buckner show) It was a bit of a funny situation though, beacause it was right towards the end of the movie when all the action is going on. In walk all the tour bus kids and they see the TV with people being shot and blown up.

Dunno yet if I'm heading out tomorrow, weather is still on/off rain righ now.

January 11th, 2003

35.26km

21.9mi