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 8th, 2003

day-431_lake-tekapo-to-lake-ohau

New Zealand: Lake Tekapo to Lake Ohau

97 km today

20537.48 km total

60.3 mi today

12735.3 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Nice and sunny today..but cold. MCQ and I hung around town a bit and then left. Was a really nice ride though the high plains with the snow covered mountains in the background. Saw a handful of touring cyclists today. One couple ad been biking though Jordan and Syria, but decided to come down here because of the war in Iraq.

Really glad it is sunny out today, because it would be a shame to miss all of this. I stopped to take a picture of some McLitter an on the way back found two brand new porn mags on the side of the road. I'd rather find license plates than porn though. Right now it is porn mags: 2, license plates: 0...bummer.

The lakes and mountains here all look like you are walking through a bizarre 60's era technicolor postcard. The colors all look a little off, almost like they are bleached.

Reacked the town of Tikapu and bought food...then fish and chips. We had another 30km to get to the lake and we didn't reach that until dark. When we reached the lake we met this old guy walking on the road. He told us good places to camp. MCQ asked about the bunkhouse that is mentioned in the cycling book:

mcq: "Is that lighted place back there part of the bunkhouse?"

old guy: "oh no, heck, you go there you'll get your head blown off"

The lake here is really nice, but it is car-camping nice. There is still a lodge 5km up the road an a new housing development the other way down the road. We'll probably spend the day here tomorrow. Oh yeah, Kurdt was found dead nine years go today...hard to belive it has been so long.

April 8th, 2003

97km

60.3mi