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 10th, 2003

day-374_penong-south-australia

South Australia: Penong South Australia

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17750.7 km total

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11005 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Got up feeling hungover and tired. Went in did laundry. A two tub machine, but I'm pretty down with the two tub skillz thanks to Duncan and Al in Emu Park, QLD. Even washed my sleeping bag, the water was nearly black, yech. Decided I was going to take today off, it was windy windy windy. Finalizing the lunky.com travel site updates is normally a pretty quick process, just run a script, then burn that file to CD. Of course I had to not have enough disk space the first time I did it, so that really messed everything up. Spent a good two hours getting that all sorted then mailed off. Was able to use the phone at the Caravan Park so I downloaded my email, piles of it everywhere, sheesh. The woman at the caravan park said that it used to be a field depot of some sort, hence all the tin buildings and stuff. I like the tin building I was pretty cool. Just a cement floor, big rattly (sp?) doors, and a single light bulb in it.

That night this guy named Jim in his 50's pulled up. He was heading east looking for fruit picking work. Had some wine with him, talking about biking, beer prices on the Nullabor, and politics.

February 10th, 2003

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