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 12th, 2003

day-435_omarama-to-tarras

New Zealand: Omarama to Tarras

80 km today

20682.48 km total

49.7 mi today

12825.3 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Man, don't ever eat generic baked beans and then sleep in a small cabin. I musta nearly killed MCQ last night. No more beans at night for sure!

Got out of the caravan park around 10:30am. The people that ran the place were really on the ball about being out by 10am to clean the place.

MCQ headed off and I went to do email and fix a thing on the clock site. Said hi to a girl in her 20's who was hitchhiking north....wouldn't see that in the US. Soon I was on the road..had a really nice ride. Not really any trees anywhere, just brown grassy hills. Caught up with MCQ at a rest area. Got to the top of Lidds Pass and took a few pics. The ride down to Tarras was nice, I hit about 65km/hr on one of the downhills. We took a gravel road which had a bunch of climbing involved, but it was nice to get away from the main road. Got to Tarras which is basically just a general store. The woman said we could camp in the school yard, just 5 bucks a person which goes to some sorta field camp for the kiddies. The five bucks was worth it just to play in the cable pully thinny and on the trampoline. Made a big dinner of potatoes and pumpkin soup. Then MCQ and I spent a good hour taking time lapse photos with LED lights.

April 12th, 2003

80km

49.7mi