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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 21st, 2003
day-354_ne-of-hopetoun-to-esperance-wa
Western Australiae of Hopetoun to Esperance
125.8 km today
16474.18 km total
78.0 mi today
10213.8 mi total

Today was one of the worst of the trip...mostly for the fact that I was in a totally pissy mood and had to ride for 8 straight hours into a headwind. I woke up at about 5am, the day was starting and it looked kinda cool...but I was way to tired to get up at that point. Didn't really matter, because about an hour later I heard these loud breathing noises and "mooooooooos" I looked out and on the other side of the fence stood mob of cows, all staring at me wondering just why I was camping near their pasture. I felt the strong wind coming from the southeast....so I knew the day was going to suck even before I got out of my sleeping bag.

Got riding around 8am and it was terribly slow. Hard to stay in a good mood when riding into a headwind by yourself. 99% of my irateness was because of that jerk who spammed my email list with his god-wielding-you-too-can-make-money-on-the-internet message. Now people want off the list or are writing me asking what the heck that was all about or are these the type of friends I have.

Rode the whole day, the only time I stopped was to put more water in my camelback. I didn't feel like stopping to take a break, mostly cause I couldn't sit still. Didn't even have yummy food to eat, lunch consisted of raw oatmeal followd by emptying a bag of Black and Gold dehydrated peas. The 5km markers slowly ticked down E100 E95 E90 and so on. By the time I got to E15 I was still in a foul mood, only very tired from not taking a break. At least people in the oncoming cars were waving.

I looked back at one point and saw two loaded down cyclists gaining on me. It was the two German guys that I last saw in Albany, Robin and Elias. I kinda popped out of my poopy mood as we rode along together, talking about how the last few days had been. We separated again but met back up in Esperance. I was glad to be in Esperance, been seeing it on the map for the last two years and now I'm here. Being the typical Australian town, everything was closed down except for the gas stations and fast food joints. So I ran into Robin and Elias again at Red Rooster, which is a proudly Australian owned fast food joint with a chicken-based theme. The fries/chips were kinda good.

We ended up heading to a caravan park. The guy running it was really nice, I asked him about the 4wd track to the Balladonia roadhouse and he pulled out pictures of the road. Talk about service.

Robin and I talked for awhile that night and I soon crashed out pretty hard. Probably going to spend 2-3 days here and head out of town.

January 21st, 2003
125.8km
78.0mi