Mackay

So after leaving Canarvon we headed back towards Mackay, our stop before the whitsundays. Paul and Jackie Stuart – of the Stuart family once more :) I hope to have a pic soon. We had a really lovely dinner with them in their *amazing* house, designed by themselves – it’s really open-plan…

Paul manages one of the sugar mills here, so he very kindly went back into work in the evening, and took Mhairi and I along to show us around. It was great, I felt like a real engineer again (however passive). They make 1400 Tonnes of sugar a day (up to 1800). We saw how the various stages work (from how they manage 1000km of railtrack, and 11,000 carriages) – which is how the raw materials (sugar cane) arrives. He showed how it is weighed (which determines how much the farmer gets paid (well, actually their %age ownership of the co-op), how the cane is stripped and pulped, juice extracted and the various washing and crystalisation methods used to get the sugar out.

I’m not going to go into too much detail just in case I get it all wrong. Oh, the furnaces were amazing.. they generate their own elec (and heat – lots of heat) from burning the bits of the cane which aren’t used. It was so impressive, really, the whole of the cane is used in some form or other.

Finally, two things…

1) the little differences between NZ (which is free of nasty things that want to kill you) and OZ, which has snakes and spiders and and and (not to mention Australians themselves… ehehehe joking joking!!)

and finally… I thought it was funny anyway…