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

July 13th, 2003

day-527_wellington-new-zealand

New Zealand: Wellington

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22185.52 km total

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13759.4 mi total

USA | Australia | New Zealand | USA

didn't wake up till late as usual. MCQ went on a ride around Wellington...I wanted to do it bu I had taken my bike apart since the weather looked crappy all week. Oh well, I'll have to do it again when I come back.

MCQ and I walked around town, it being Sunday everything started closing the moment we left Becki's apartment. Went and got a kebab. Talked at length with this Iraqi guy running the kebab shop....about politics of course. It was good to see his perspective on things. He liked the fact that Mr. S. is gone and he thanks the Americans, but he said his friends back in Iraq are a bit distrustful of the American military. He says the amount of civilians killed by Americans doesn't get reflected in the media. He told me to tell Bush not to kill any more Iraqis, since they make good kebabs.

MCQ and I were going to rent a movie but I remembered that "Bring it On" was on TV tonight, so we decided to just watch that instead. Watching the movie, it was amazing how those little girls I met in Australia knew lines from the movie.....even though it was a movie their mom wouldn't let them see (they told me they saw it at a friends house. Anyway, I liked that movie, mostly for the fact that their is a nice Clash reference and the kid has a lot of cool posters on his walls. Plus the cheers are pretty funny, "we act like we are on speed, we're cheerleaders, cheerleaders!"

July 13th, 2003

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