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 28th, 2003

day-451_te-anau-to-mavora-lakes

New Zealand: Doubtful Sound/Te Anau to Mavora Lakes

72 km today

21036.52 km total

44.7 mi today

13045.3 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

All the sandfly bites seemed to come to a peak at about 3am, cause I was itching like crazy.

We rolled out of the hostel about 10:30am. MCQ had left this bike hood thing he didn't want behind at the hostel. After MCQ had left I was packing up the bike out front. A guy came running out to say that we had left this in the room...the thing MCQ left behind. I thanked him to keep him feeling good samaritiny and stashed it in my stuff. We hung around town a little...saw the Yukon Girls from the hostel in town and I got a clock photo with them (hi!). Rolling out of town we ran into Fi from the kayak trip and said hi to her.

Ride was pretty normal today. A good chunk of the ride is on this gravel road that cuts over the mountains back towards Queenstown. I passed a guy herding some very large steers (size of a small tank) with his quadrunner. The steers would cut off track and he'd make a noise and the dogs on the trailer would be jump off and chase after the cows.

I caught back up to MCQ and we continued on. Saw a crop dusting plane land, reload, and take back off. Awhile later the plane flew right over us and we waved. The pilot tipped the wings of the plane to wave back. I told MCQ it was kinda cool getting waved at by a carload of cute girls and a crop dusting plane in the same day. The cool thing about this is that you don't get waved at by carloads of cute girls everyday.

We got near the Mavora likes and all of the sudden everything was trees, just like back home. I caught up to MCQ and we both said the same thing about how it looked just like back home. Ran into a guy who was walking out, he and his buddy had wrecked/buggered their 4wd way up the road and he was walking until he could get mobile phone coverage.

Tomorrow MCQ and I go to Queenstown, gotta take the ferry back across the lake.

April 28th, 2003

72km

44.7mi