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 29th, 2003

day-362_condingup-to-some-old-homestead-110km-up-the-track

Western Australia: Condingup to Deralinya Homestead

115 km today

16693.14 km total

71.3 mi today

10349.5 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Got up at the usual time, soon joined Kevin for coffee. Everyone else was soon up and running around. Louise gave me all kinds of yummy food...Christmas candy, half of a carrot cake, peas, corn, sprouts, lasange, and fried rice. We all said our goodbyes and I left around 9am. The lasange kept calling me from my front pannier, so it didn't even make it 5km.

The ride was pretty uneventful today. This road is unsealed for the large majority of it, hence there is hardly any traffic. Had a pretty good tailwind so the ride was pretty fast. I was hitting the rocks pretty hard and soon my back tire started leaking, so I stopped. All within the hour I stopped I put on a new tire and tube, fixed a rack bolt, and changed a spoke. Wasn't but 30 minutes later that I hit a rock and got a flat on the back.

I'm at this little old homestead right now. I had heard about it and it was just in the perfect spot for stopping for the day. Sign says it has been here since 1890. Inside there are all kinds of things. Religious books, guest book, tabliod trash and fishing magazines. The wind keeps blowing in through all the cracks in the walls. I went to make dinner and came across some food that I had forgotten about, cheese and mushrooms. It smelled like a urinal in a camper, worse yet it was multiplying via maggots, ewww. Oh yeah, speaking of which, flies have been terrible, had to have the $4.71 Normanton, QLD headnet on today they were so bad.

I've eaten most of Louise's yummy food by this point and all of it has hit me by now...so time for bed.

January 29th, 2003

115km

71.3mi