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

February 9th, 2003

day-373_e-of-nundroo-roadhouse-to-a-tin-shack-in-penong-sa

South Australia: e of Nundroo to a tin shack in Penong

80.24 km today

17750.7 km total

49.7 mi today

11005 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Got up late, got going late...

body was too tired to get going early. Ended up eating a mishmash of breakfast (not much food left) and didn't get going till 11:00am. The whole day basically drug along, had the wind in my face most of the day. Kind of hard to keep the spirts up in such a situation. The highway is so narrow that anytime I see a truck coming (once ever 5 minutes) I have to ride in the gravel (and try to not fall over). Flies were terrible today. Flies are attracted to smelly things and I do indeed smell smelly, so maybe that is it.

Rolled into Penong around 6pm. Turns out this is an actual town...looks like I'm done with the Nullabor. The store closed at 1:30pm, but it closed at 5:30pm on weekends so I wouldda missed out anyway. Went to the caravan park...ended up in probably the oddest but coolest caravan park accomodation I've ever been in. I'm in a tin carport building. It has a light bulb and a couple of power points to which I'm using to charge up this PC and all my AA batteries. Met some people in the kitchen area. Two are from the UK, the other from Australia. We ended up drinking beer and talking all night. (even got a clock photo). Glad I didn't decide to camp out in the bush tonight. So excited that tomorrow I'm gonna wash my sleeping bag...mom would bew proud, it smells horrid.

Anyway, at least I found some nice people to talk to for the night, otherwise today would have been kind of a klunker of a day.

February 9th, 2003

80.24km

49.7mi