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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.
•••

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
March 2nd, 2003
day-394_adelaide-to-20km-w-of-some-town-that-starts-with
South AustraliaAdelaide to 20km w of Strathalbyn
72.41 km today
19086.23 km total
45.0 mi today
11833.3 mi total

Had a nice breakfast with everyone and soon made my way out of the Henley Beach Pad.

The ride out of town was pretty typical. Weekend traffic everywhere. I was going to head all the way south and then cut over to avoid the hills that surround Adelaide. There was too much traffic. so I just headed east instead. Pretty soon I found myself climbing one of the steepest hills in recent memory. Climb climb climb listening to Public Enemy's "Fear of a Black Planet" album. Awhile later I was at the top of the hill. I really didn't know exactly where I was at that point, I just headed southeast. It was a nice ride downhill though. Twisting and turning all the way dowhill. The sun was starting to set an I stopped to get a photo of it. A truck drove by and the driver said "pretty good!" pointing to the sunset. Ended up talking to them for awhile, a nice couple from Adelaide named Pete and Jessie. They had a place about 15km down the road and said I could camp there. We talked awhile and soon I was off again. It was dark pretty quick and I missed the turnoff to their place. I was a little bummed but just kept riding. I looked at a couple spots to camp near the road, but neither of them looked to good. Eventually I found an abandoned road above a golf course and set up camp there. I want more cookies, I have no more cookies.

March 2nd, 2003
72.41km
45.0mi