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 16th, 2003

day-349_denmark-to-albany-wa

Western Australia: Denmark to Albany

72.52 km today

15902.81 km total

45.0 mi today

9859.5 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Spent the morning finishing up update #5, about time I got another one sent out...it has been over four months since I mailed out the last one. Did some more net stuff and answered email, got the bike packed and didn't leave Denmark till 2pm. Bike computer is finally calibrated correctly, but my total kilometerage is probably 200km farther than what it whould be. Significant in that today I passed the 16,000 km mark.

Had a really fast ride to Albany, made it in about three hours. Albany is the district center for this area and a little large. It has a lot of old buildings and a nice feel to it. The whole town is built on a hillside, reminds me a lot of towns in the San Juan Islands of Washington State in the USA.

Anthony was gone aready from work so I dunno if I will see him again anytime soon. Ran into the two German guys bike touring guys that I met last week north of Bunbury. They asked why it took me so long...seems they didn't go around the outside like I did.

I'm at a nice caravan park right now, it looks out over the water and the lights of Albany reflect off the bay. There are about three kids around 10 or so all fishing, very inquisive kids...asking me all kinds of questions and such.

Tomorrow I'm going to go out and see the arch and blowholes, then go take a chunk out of the 500km push to Esperance...

January 16th, 2003

72.52km

45.0mi