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 30th, 2003

day-363_100km-sw-of-balladonia-roadhouse-to-30km-e-of-baladonia-roadhouse

Western Australia: Deralinya Homestead to 30km e of Baladonia Roadhouse

117 km today

16810.14 km total

72.5 mi today

10422 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Got up a bit early but didn't get moving till the usual time. Spent breakfast reading some whack eAustralian ebusiness emagazine eabout ethe einternet. It kept referring to a recent dip in tech stocks and all these other buzzwords that have long gone out of fashion. Then I discovered that the article was nearly three years old. heh.

The ride was alright today, only saw about three cars the entire way to the roadhouse. Didn't keep my rear tire inflated enoough and got a flast when I hit a rock pretty hard. One car passed me and we talked as I rode, soon stopping. From the accent it sounded like the guy was from Ireland, he knew I was from the US. His wife gave me candy and plums.

Got to the roadhouse and got some food and $10.00 worth of water (4.5 whole liters!). Turns out I didn't miss skylab in Norseman at all, the roadhouse had a couple pieces of there. Turns out that in July 1979 Skylab crashed right over this area. They had some National Geographic articles there, along with a photocopy of a ticket. The ticket was a littering infringement made out to NASA for $400.00, it was pretty cute. I called Lousie to tell her I made it though as per her request and then headed out. Had a headwind and tha tcut my speed in half. Ended up finding some weak AM station playing Steely Dan.

I'm finally on the Nullabor proper, kinda cool...only been looking forward to this part for about three years now. It is basically an 800 mile stretch of road without any towns, just a roadhouse eery 120 miles so. Gotta get rolling tomorrow when the wind will be less and it will be a bit cooler. Only have about 8 liters to go the next 150km...might have to yogi some off of some motorist.

Now an adult contemporary era Eric Clapton song is on the radio, time to turn that off and go to bed.

January 30th, 2003

117km

72.5mi