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.

•••

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

•••

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

•••

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

•••

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 2nd, 2003

day-486_n-of-jacobs-creek-to-franz-joseph-glacier

New Zealand: 3km north of Jacobs River to Franz Joseph Glacier

60 km today

21474.52 km total

37.3 mi today

13317.6 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

It was raining pretty hard this morning but let up around 10am. I headed out of the motel around 11am. I wasn't full of motivation today and was planning on just hanging it up for the day at Fox glacier. Got to Fox glacier around 2pm. There were a couple of cafes there and a store. I ate some food and just got the urge to keep riding even though my knee hurt. Oh yeah, in the grocery store they had one of the most lame attempts at cashing in on the tourist trade. There was this thin white t-shirt hanging in the back of the store. There was an outline of New Zealand (I think) and it just read "Fox Glacier". The real clinger was the fact that the shirt was dirty.

The 24km from Fox to Franz Joseph glacier was a bit of work. Three major hills to climb. Rolled into town in the late afternoon. Found a backpackers to stay at and got settled in. The guy, Sean, and his kid Ethan were staying at the hostel. We ended up going out for a beer later...with Sean telling me all kinds of crazy stories. We talked of all of lifes woes, namely politics and girls!

June 2nd, 2003

60km

37.3mi