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 7th, 2003

day-430_fairlie-to-lake-tekapo

New Zealand: Fairlie to Lake Tekapo

45.14 km today

20440.48 km total

28.0 mi today

12675 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Met a guy from the US this morning. He was from Park City, Utah, down here just travelling around...seemed to be having a good three weeks. MCQ went up to the store and I finished breakfast. Said goodbye to Bernard at the holiday park....nice folks there. (thanks again if you guys are reading this!). Made our way out of town and headed west. Had to put the raingear back on, other than that the ride was nice and uneventful. In Burke's Pass there was a large St Berndard, roughtly the size of a C-5 galaxy plane. I wanted to take a picture but there were a couple women standing by it so I didn't.

A van passed me and the guy leaned out the window and yelled something at me. People, if you wish to hurl insults/obscenities at people on bikes, you must slow down to a speed where the trajectory of your voice won't land in the bushes 10 feet ahead of the target.

Discovered that the plastic reflector posts are great for bending back and launching pieces of gravel catapult like at MCQ, got some great video of it.

We got into Lake Tekapo, it was starting to get pretty cold. Went to the hostel and got sorted there. Couldn't really find anything good at the store to eat, so I had a dinner of plain rice, tomatoes, and baked beans.

Been reading the book "Fast Food Nation", quite an interesting read. Almost a third of the way though it. Tomorrow I dunno if it is going to be a long day or short day...MCQ is dishing out the plans for the most part. After a year of planning and daily decision making in Australia, it is kind of nice to have someone else do the driving so to speak. Oh yeah, MCQ and I played five games of Yahtzee, I won three, but he won in overall point total. (in case you were wondering...)

April 7th, 2003

45.14km

28.0mi