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 5th, 2003

day-428_geraldine-to-fairlie-nz

New Zealand: Geraline to Fairlie

49.29 km today

20395.34 km total

30.6 mi today

12647 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

MCQ and I left the caravan park around 10:30am. Went into town to the bakery. I waited around to use the internet, needed to get my health insurance stuff taken care of. Waited and waiting for this kid to finish. Finally he did...got that sorted. It wasn't till about 12:30pm that MCQ and I got going out of town. Somewhere we ended up splitting up. I had to stop and put on my raingear, yes, I kid you not, I had to put on raingear for the first time in about 7 months. I farted around awhile and took my time getting to Fairlie. Got there and didn't see MCQ, but figured he'd already booked us into a cabin at the holiday park..sure enough he did. Got cleaned up and read for awhile.

We made our way into town and got takeway food that took a long time to well, get to the point of being able to take it away. Went to one pub, it was kinda quiet. Had a jug of beer there an then went to the noisier pub. Had a few more jugs there. Met these dudes who where there and they had won their rugby game. Got the whole info on Rugby, go for the face when the dude is on the ground. Even got to see the mean looking spiky shoes and stuff. Ended up going back to the other pub and met up with everyone else. Looks like MCQ and I ended up beating his and Knutson's record of five jugs in one night.

April 5th, 2003

49.29km

30.6mi