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 23rd, 2003

day-446_mossburn-to-te-anau-nz

New Zealand: Mossburn to Te Anau

60.78 km today

20964.16 km total

37.8 mi today

13000.4 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Wow, the hostel is playing the Rolling Stones' "Exile on Main St." album right now, how nice, I haven't heard this album in awhile. I love that "the sunshine bores the daylights out of me" line...anyway...

I'm actually writing this a couple days later, but pretend that I wrote it the night of the 23rd..

The ride today was pretty rough. Although it was only a shorter ride, it was into a headwind for a large chunk of the way and it made for really slow going....just like the west coast of Australia.

After awhile we rolled into Te Anau and set up shop at the holiday park. I needed to address the food issue in a bad way, so I went an got fish and chips then chased it down with ice cream. Looks like we are going to be going sea kayaking on Saturday and Sunday...moving into the hostel tomorrow also.

Met this Japanese guy who was kayaking down the coast of New Zealand. Eventually he got somewhere where he couldn't kayak..."so I stashed the kayak in the bush, hitchhiked into town and bought this van". (which was a pretty expensive 4wd van too)

It rained a bit and was windy thoughout the night, but nothing too terrible.

April 23rd, 2003

60.78km

37.8mi