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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 16th, 2003
day-380_elliston-to-mount-drummond-sa
South AustraliaElliston to Mount Drummond
90.77 km today
18186.88 km total
56.3 mi today
11275.5 mi total

Woke up areoud 9am, a lot earlier than I thought. Got cleaned up and packed up. Headed out around 11am. On the way out of town I ran into M.V, he pulled over to my side of the road. How convienent in that I didn't get a chance to say goodbye last night. We talked a bit and I was soon on my way. Had a bit of a headwind, but I really didn't mind since I wanted to ride. Whole ride today was pretty uneventful for the most part. Towards the end of the day I passed though Mt. Hope, which was basically just a community of about 10 homes. I had stopped for a second and when I got going again I glanced back...there was a guy on a bike right near me. I jumped a little...since I didn't expect to see anyone on a bike out here. Turns out he was just biking his daily 16km loop. I rode about 5km/hr faster with him and wasn't even feeling it. Funny how you can bike a lot faster if you just have someone else to ride with. His name was Roger, basically just a surfer living up here. Was out on the bike today just to get out of the house. A turnoff came up and we bid goodbye, then I was on my own again. Rode another 10km or so and found a spot to camp in the bush. Going to try and get to Port Lincoln earlier than normal tomorrow so I can hopefully get my frame all welded up. Right now I need sleep, body still knows it got short-changed 4 hours and it is going to be payback time soon.

February 16th, 2003
90.77km
56.3mi