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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 8th, 2003
day-400_yambuk-to-port-campbell-sa
VictoriaYambuk to Port Campbell
118.57 km today
19811.37 km total
73.7 mi today
12284 mi total

Too tired to write last night, but anyway...

Hung around the rest area for awhile, eating my rice for breakfast and working on the clock site. Rolled into Port Fairy an hour or so later. People everywhere. There was the folk festival proper, then there was all this stuff going on in the streets. There was this one band playing Applachian music, most of the band members had to have been younger than 16 or so. A lot of other folksies playing in the street, with many songs about Mr. Bush and Iraq. I walked past this puppet show where the puppets where talking about being scared because of Iraq. One of the puppets said that as long as they follow God then everything will be alright. A couple of girls cringed and walked off in front of me and I soon followed.

The ride to Warrnambool was uneventful other than me stopping at an antique store. Bought a large pizza in Warrnambool, ate the whole thing in front of the shop in about 10 minutes, so it came out to be a 59 cents a minute pizza. Continued on south into the headwind. Wasn't feeling to motivated but kept riding. The rain would come down for 30 seconds at a time and then stop.

Got to the ocean and went to one of the lookouts. The stacks out in the sea were amazing, caught them right at sunset. One of the most unique things I've seen in a long time. Past though Peterborough. Looked like a nice town but I couldn't really stay. Pushed it though the dark to Port Campbell, listening to a bunch of very long CCR songs along the way. All of the places had "no vacancy" signs up...not good. Found the hostel and they had one up too. I asked and they did have one bed available. Got settled in and went to sleep around midnight. Several drunk people came back around 2am making all kinds of noise. One guy forgot his key so he was knocking on the door.

March 8th, 2003
118.57km
73.7mi