Torrential Tully

While in Mission Beach, the Beeson clan joined us on a day trip to Tully. They have one of the only tours of a working sugar mill that can still be taken, and we were keen to go and experience it before the insurance companies shut it down! We started the day by climbing the big gumboot, which illustrates Tully's annual rainfall in a VERY visual way. They get over 7m a year, which is the height of the gumboot! It's contained to a very small area though - the town that is only 20km down the road gets half their rainfall.

After marvelling at such a quantity of water, we made our way to the Tully Sugar Mill. They were still running 1 tour a day, down from the 3 that they run in peak tourist season. We are now all experts at donning the PPE, and the kids were pleased with the (slightly) smaller sizes for them. After a rather long introduction in a quiet and blessedly air conditioned room, we were off on our trek through the factory site.

It was fascinating seeing the process, having watched the first part so often in Port Douglas. We saw the headers harvesting the sugar cane, and spitting the billets into some haulouts. We saw the trucks emptying the billets into the carriages. We saw the little locos trundling off to the mill, and now we were able to see what happened next.

The mill was huge and I was intrigued to hear they generate electricity as a by-product. Bonus!We learnt that the reason sugar cane is burnt in other areas, is to neutralise the rat urine which can kill farmers. They don't do it in Tully as they have a different process.

The billets are rotated and weighed on arrival so the farmer can be paid. 

Then they travel along a conveyer belt to be shredded and crushed, which creates juice and bagasse (the fibres). The bagasse is burnt to fuel the mill and create the excess electricity, while the juice is processed further. 

It is heated and clarified, concentrated into molasses and spun, heated and dried into sugar. They need to seed the sugar crystals with teeny tiny existing sugar crystals, and Tully creates export-quality sugar which is kind of half raw sugar and half not. You can't buy it in Australia and it requires further refinement to turn into white sugar, but ALL of Tully's sugar goes to China.

I found it really interesting, but again it was a little too detailed for the kids. They did well though, especially considering the tour went for 2 hours and 1 of those was lunchtime!

As soon as we were let free, we hightailed it to a local swimming hole where there were BBQs to cook our sausage and bread lunch. If only there was gas in those BBQs... Fortunately Marty had a couple of cookers and pans in their car and the boys were able to rustle up lunch while we watched the kids swim. Phew!

We had a really great day, made all the better with great friends to spend it with. I partiularly liked the way the tourguide assumed that Angus was Belinda's son as he was sitting (fidgetting) next to her during the introduction. LOL!