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

March 3rd, 2003

day-395_strathalbyn-to-meningie-sa

South Australia: 20km w of Strathalbyn to Meningie

111.5 km today

19197.73 km total

69.3 mi today

11902.6 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Woke up this morning and realized I was camped above a golf course. Woke up around sunrise because every single Cockatoo in Australia decided to take up residence in a nearby tree. SQACK!!! Ate breakfast there and headed out.

Morning was uneventful. Got to Wellington and did lunch there. There was this little park with a concrete picnic table that I cooked dinner on. Ants were everywhere! I couldn't put my feet down otherwise they would come right up my leg. I swatted a fly and it fell to the ground. About 5 minutes later the ants had dismantled about half the fly. I tried to take a nap, but gave up and headed out. As expected, there was a nice huge patch of green grass near the Murray River ferry dock. I ended up napping there a little just for the sake of it. Took the ferry across the river an soon was heading south on Highway 1...into the wind. This slowed everything down considerably. Most of the talk radio was dominated by people calling in and whining about the new reduced speed limits in Adelaide. I love how the city says it will be about a three month period to get the new (slower) speed limit signs in...yet people call in complaining that the old 60km ones are still up on such and such road.

Got into Meningie around 6:45pm..of course the stores closed at 6:30pm. Found a spot to camp outside of town...then came back into town to the park to cook dinner and type the words I'm currently typing. Called Maree in Tasmania but had to put her on hold since there was this most incredible sunset over the nearby lake. (check out this pics!)

Wow, only about 8-9 more days of biking...

March 3rd, 2003

111.5km

69.3mi