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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 28th, 2003
day-392_adelaide-sa
South AustraliaAdelaide
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Spent the morning updating the travel site. Headed into town in the afternoon to mail it of and pick up some stuff waiting for me at the post office. The downtown post office was very impressive, the ceiling seemed to be about five floors up.

Got hungry and went past this chinese takeaway place for food. It was the end of the day and he tried wheeling and dealing me for the other two meals that were there. The price kept fluctuating both up and down. I said no and he just threw them in for free. I was going to save one for Jens, but my body demanded I eat all three. Hopefully Jens won't read this entry and see that I stiffed him out of a free chinese meal. (then again, it tasted like it had sat a good 4 hours under a heatlamp, so maybe I was doing Jens a favor after all)

Jens and I went out that night and ended up at a trendy nightspot called Supamild. There were a couple of these Eminem-with-visor-but-I'm-bored looking dudes sitting on the couch staring at the wall. I think they were going out of their way to act cool or something. I really wished I had the clock with me cause it would have made for a nice picture.

We took a taxi home, then spent another good hour talking and reading up on what Nicole Kidman is up to.

February 28th, 2003
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