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

April 3rd, 2003

day-426_christchurch-to-some-gorge-that-starts-with-an

New Zealand: Christchurch to Rakaia Gorge

92.8 km today

20259.19 km total

57.7 mi today

12562.4 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

"Couldn't be bothered writing last night, got to sucked into the Woodward and Bernstein book...so now it is morning, mcq is watercoloring and now peeling an orange...anyway.

MCQ and I rolled out of the holiday park around 10am. Well, we left the cabin around 10am. We biked about 25 meters to the playgound area. This was probably the coolest playground area I've ever seen, much better than anything in the US. Lots of cool things to fall off of and get poked by. The liability laws are much different than in the US, here it seems to be if you get hurt it is your own damn fault. We spent a good 20 minutes here and then headed out.

Had a nice ride thoughout the day. Clipped along at a good 20km/hr+. I unloaded a bunch of stuff in Melbourne so my bike is a bit lighter now, only weighs about as much as a tank rather than an aircraft carrier.

We stopped in Dairfield for lunch. I made up a bunch of pasta and finished it off with two scoops of ice cream. We continued on. It is starting to get a bit more mountainy and stuff now. Funny, there was more scenery change in four hours here than two months in outback Australia.

Camped at a "wilderness" camp on the river. There are toilets, running water, nice green mowed grass, and a bazillion RV's all parked looking over the river. I haven't seen so many RV's in a long time, Australia doesn't have them, just the 5th wheel caravan thingys. Tomorrow should be an easy day for the most part.

I like it here in New Zealand, people are nice, it is green, and ice cream is cheap.

April 3rd, 2003

92.8km

57.7mi