Tully

We arrived in Tully to overcast skies and the heavens opened up.    We grabbed a free spot at the showgrounds, had a free coffee/cake and a banana at the Info Centre and got some tour maps etc.  Fantastic info centre with very friendly staff.   Tully and Innisfail produce 90% of our bananas and they have the only Sugar Mill that the public can tour, so its all about sugar cane and bananas up here.

  We drove out and had a walk along the famous Mission Beach.    It was like a lot of the beaches we have come across, full of debris, mostly tree branches and lots of coral.  Very beachy/touristy.   It was nice but cant say WOW.  Visited a local banana farm.   Watched the bananas being sorted, washed and packed and then bought 10 for $2.

   A planned trip to Tully Gorge was called off 15km into the trip, it was bucketing down.  The mountains shrouded with mist.  Our friends went ahead and it was perfectly fine up in the rainforest.!!!!   This gorge is one of the best in Australia for white water rafting and if you go up around lunchtime each day you get to see them ride the rapids.   That had been our plan.     So with a crappy day weather wise we did what we needed to do.   Shopping, laundry, cooking and postcards.    The next day we did a tour of the Tully Sugar Mill.   It was a very interesting tour lasting two hours.    We have travelled thru so many sugar cane farms and it was really good to actually learn about what we had seen and the processes involved.

 Essentially the sugar cane is shredded, passed thru mills to extract the sugar juice.   The fibre left over is called Bagasse and that is used to operate the boiler plant which provides steam to run the whole sugar mill.  The excess Bagasse not needed by the factory is put back into the grid and powers about 5000 homes.    The company have been generating enough electricity to run their mill and export to the grid since 1997.   This place is so self sufficient.

  The milled cane juice contains some soil and other impurities.   It is heated and lime is added.   This settles the impurities, it is then vacuum filtered to remove any lasting sugar juice.   The filtered mud left behind is rich in nutrients and that "mud" is then sold back to the farmers for fertiliser.      We had seen trucks delivering and spreading what we thought was topsoil but now know it is the mud mix left over from the sugar cane crush. So from the time the cane is cut and harvested, virtually every part of the cane is used for some purpose and virtually nothing is wasted.

The mill also has a machine that has a powerful magnet in it that detects any metal that comes thru the crushing mills mixed in with the sugar cane. Bits of gates, fencing, machine parts, blades etc.  The above bin is just a few days worth of stuff this magnet detected.   Apparently after Cyclone Yasi, they needed 10 tonne skips continually there was so much debris amongst the cane.

In the 6 month season, just started, this mill, now owned by the Chinese, will crush 2,400,000 tonnes of cane and produce approx. 298,000 tonnes of raw sugar.   All of the sugar produced here goes straight to the export market.   Apart from the free samples we got today.    We found the mill itself to be old and quite dirty. It started in 1924.  A fairly dangerous place for both worker and visitor.    Lots of leaking pipes, steam generated everywhere, lots of debris just lying around everywhere.   Glad we did the tour but thought  the mill itself would have been a more modern and streamlined op.     We tossed up whether to stay another day in Tully or hit the road, its still drizzly.  We have decided to take our chances and hope the rain disappears further North.    Really shouldnt complain.   The weather has been kind to us up until now.   We are still in thongs and shorts even in the rain cos it just isnt cold, just muggy.   Having to wear sneakers to the mill tour today nearly killed me.    I love my thongs.