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 6th, 2003

day-398_20km-n-of-millicent-to-nelson-sa

South Australia: 20km n of Millicent to Nelson

114.7 km today

19561.78 km total

71.3 mi today

12128.9 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Another day done.

Was going to sleep in today but the tree above me contained about 500 crows around sunrise. "CAW CAW CAW". I eventually went nuts and started to scream at them and tell them to shut the fuke up. Every three seconds they would start again, so I kept repeating myself every 2.5 seconds. They never left so I just got up. Bird crap all over my tent...great.

Got into the town of Millicent around 9:30am. It was a lot bigger than I thought considering it still had somewhat small lettering on the map. Cooked breakfast at a park listening to Triple J. They had the guy on who made a documentary on human beat-boxing...was pretty interesting. Turns out this guy was also the kid in Ferris Bueller's day off who says "Oh no, Ferris is supposed to get me out of Summer School"

Left town, found a flurry of opened envelopes to "Millicent Feed and Seed" for the next few km. Met a cyclist from Holland...one of the first cyclists I've met in ages. Had a pretty steady ride into Mt. Gambier. The town was rather large. Bike tubes were $12.00, I think the bike store here wins the award for most overpriced bike tubes in Australia.

Headed out of town. Met another cyclist (two in one day!) from Germany. He had gone down the Pacific Coast of the US, even knew where Yakima was. I crossed the Victorian Border just before sunset. It was a little wierd to be seeing that sign again. Got into the town of Nelson and scouted out a place to camp in the bush. Called Maree in Tasmania, then came back to my bush camp here and made a yummy dinner (pasta sause, cheese, pasta, veggies, and chocolate chip cookies though the cooking process).

Tomorrow I'll pass though Portland, but don't think I'll make it to Port Fairy.

March 6th, 2003

114.7km

71.3mi