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.
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).
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.
Craig
Got up this morning and nerded out on one of the computers. I was next to the hostel room with the one double bed. I was typing away when the cleaning guy went in. He looked around, then picked up the wastebasket to empty it. "Hmm", looking in it, "No question as to what they were up to last night, I knew they weren't playing monopoly!". I indicated that Monopoly did have a jail, so if they used their imagination maybe they could have been playing a version of strip monopoly or something.
Walked around town today, had to mail some stuff to Wanaka and Okarito. My package from myself that Robin mailed to me arrived, yay, more crap to haul home. Walked around Cuba street a bit, nice to be somewhere unique, well, unique when you compare it to a suburban shopping center.
I took one photo of a sign concerning someone selling a bunch of records. Right as I was taking it a kid walked by me and said "oh hey!, you like my sign huh?". I said that I did and he seemed pretty happy.
A bunch of people from the hostel were going gokarting. 25 bucks for 25 minutes, seemed like a good time. It took us awhile to find the place but we got there. The go-karting was a lot of fun and worth every penny. I was trying to film and drive at the same time but that didn't work out too well. I didn't want one of the people who worked there to see me and make me stop or something. The karts were pretty fast. They have these radios on them so if there is a potential crash situation coming up, the race guys can hit a button and slow everyone's car down. The cars are all computerized so you get your exact lap times and see who came in where. I came in the middle, mostly cause I was fumbling around with the camera for about 5 minutes so I couldn't drive a-g-g-r-e-s-s-i-v-e. Back at the hostel, like an hour later, people were still analyzing the race results, it was kida funny. My clothes reek of gas fumes, for once I'd rather smell like cigarette smoke!
We got back to the hos