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 14th, 2003

day-378_port-kenny-to-elliston-sa

South Australia: Point Kenny to Elliston

68.22 km today

18096.11 km total

42.3 mi today

11219.2 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Up till midnight last night answering email...hence body refused to wake up until 9:00am. Was feeling kinda groggy for the most part. Hung out at the general store for awhile and called Maree. Headed out of town around 11:00am. The ride was pretty nice for the most part, no real wind or anything so it was pleasant. The only bad part were the flies, flies flies flies. It was pretty hot too, about 105f out. I stopped to refill my camelback and kill some flies. Only got about one. At about 3:00pm the wind came up as usual...making the last 10km into Ellison a bit tedious. I decided I wasn't going to go any farther today, because I never really have had a decent ride in a headwind...so I might as well take the rest of the day off. Everyone here in this town is pretty nice. Even the little kids all say hello. Ended up going to the caravan park, the woman was pretty nice. She said if the storm came in I could just move into the kitchen to stay out of the rain...cool. The grocery store has some sorta contest where you guess in what square the horse (out back?) is going to poop in. Raises money for chairity I guess.

There is a bakery here in town, so I'm having a Friday Night rock star meal of a big Calzone and go to the pub later. Maybe tomorrow I'll be up early, but I doubt it.

February 14th, 2003

68.22km

42.3mi