Day 71
Cairns - Paronella Park - Innisfail - Tully - Cardwell - Lucinda
"Get on that sugar train
There is some place
For everyone....."
We became sugar experts today! Well not exactly growing the cane but once Farmer Joe hacks it into little pieces - we're good from there !
We awoke to Pancake breakfast day at the park in Cairns - put on free every Thursday. The kids have been hanging for this since we arrived! They each ate 3 full plate sized pancakes with maple syrup!! They needed a swim after that of course and so it was one last swim in the pool before we hit the road again.
We left just after 10am and drove south. Our first stop was a rather unique South American style concrete built palace called Paronella Park. It was built in the 1930's - obviously by an eccentric. It has it's own hydro electric station powered by the river next to it and now has a caravan park too. It was never really finished and whilst some vistas are great with the green overgrowing the concrete , it's not quite there and we were left wondering what it could have been. The Army built a suspension bridge and fixed the hydro in 1988. We stopped, took some pics and wandered around and kept moving on.
We drove through some beautiful sugar country today - particularly from Paronella onwards. We had deviated off the Bruce Highway and travelled down the Canecutters Way. It meanders through little sugar towns - train tracks everywhere with their narrow gauges and road crossings - all heading for the local mill. Bins of freshly harvested cane in 4 and 10 tonne loads behind locomotives chugging along.
Back on the Bruce Highway, we rolled into Tully. The township was completely smashed during Cyclone Yasi back in Feb. 2011 and is still recovering. They love seeing people come through their town too.
We booked in a tour at the Tully Sugar Mill and really had a great time looking over their whole operation. We saw the kilometres of bins on the tracks full of sugar billets (stalks) and watched the processing operation end to end.
Tully don't supply to the Australian market - everything gets shipped overseas in a raw sugar state. The process from cane to sugar takes 8 hours and they produce 80 tonnes of sugar here every hour ! What we were most impressed with is how technology and innovation means now everything is used and reused - its fully sustainable! The wasted cane leftovers are burned to power the whole plant at 1000 degrees - they even sell the leftover green energy to Origin and make millions doing so. The dirt from the cane is processed and trucked back to the farms too! The water is reused over and over to get all the residual sugar out.
We had our heads in everywhere checking out production - from the furnace window to the centrifuges that spin the sugar from the molasses. What looked like smoke billowing from the stacks is just steam.
We got to sample the sugar straight off the conveyor belts - both in molasses and raw sugar forms and even got sample bags! You'd have to go overseas otherwise to try their sugar!
We drove through the township of Tully before continuing south. We continued onto Cardwell which was completely annihilated by Yasi. It took everything as it was where Yasi hit land. The town is slowly rebuilding . The Pub has even named a Yasi Bar!
From there it was a further 100 kilometres to our stop tonight at Lucinda. It has 5.7 kilometre jetty out to sea to transport sugar to awaiting tankers . It's huge and the railway bins of sugar keep rolling!
We walked along the beach (croc warnings and everything) whilst the sun set over the mountain ranges behind us. Beautiful light for photos on the beach tonight too.
Tomorrow we head for Townsville and from there - wherever we end up....!