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

June 1st, 2003

day-485_haast-to-3km-north-of-jacobs-river

New Zealand: Haast to 3km north of Jacobs River

88 km today

21414.52 km total

54.7 mi today

13280.3 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

Didn't get rained on today. Took awhile to get out of the hostel. Had a long talk with Susan there about outback Australia. Right as I pulled onto the road was a guy and a young kid hitchhiking north. Got to talking to them, and a clock photo!

The day was pretty uneventful, a lot of up and down. I did get to see the ocean for the first time since I got to New Zealand.

At some moments I felt like sitting on my butt, other times I was glad I was riding. Seems that the 1-4pm is my least productive / enthusiastic part of the day. As I was climbing one of the hills, one of the backpacker busses went past me. I couldn't see anyone inside until the last moment when I saw someone clapping in the window.

Lotsa motorcycles been going by me in the last few days too. It was dark when I pulled into the motel here. Only 18 bucks for a cabin, plus they had cookies for sale. (eaten half the package already). Not a whole lot of reading material here. There was a readers digest here, but it was a bit annoying after awhile at how short everything was. I mean, the entire NZ leg of this trip could be described in the above paragraphs. Going to go to Franz Joseph glacier tomorrow. Another backpackerish type town. Might take a day off there, knee hurts a bit. Oh yeah, when I went to pay I found out my credit card expired. I knew that it was going to expire, but the month off in Wanaka threw things off mentally for me.

June 1st, 2003

88km

54.7mi