Sugar Cane Country

Mon 22 June… An early start and we are away from the camp by 8 o’clock as we have an appointment in the centre of town at the doctors. After a very thorough medical we are both certified! Peter wants to know why he always gets the doctor with the most limited grasp of the English language. Her accent and his deafness, they may well have been speaking in Aborigine! In fact he thinks they were. Navigator thought the Doc was fine, though she did tell her that her B M I was rather high, as anybody looking at the photos would know! Never mind! Anyway now we are passed fit to dive, we are moving on before the R A A F starts revving up again. We are starving by the time we come out,2 hours later and decide to have breakfast in the café attached to the surgery. Peter is confronted by a sachet of barbeque sauce to put on his bacon and egg Panini and asked “how does this work then?” I advised him not to point it at himself as he squeezed, next thing I knew I was being splattered with the stuff. In my hair, on my glasses, I looked like I had the measles, tee-shirt got it as well, the only thing he missed was my scrambled egg! I just had hysterics, and couldn’t believe that no one had been watching!
We are moving a little further north towards Cairns but won’t be going quite as far as that. There are a couple free camps along the coast that we thought we might try. They have most of the amenities but no electricity, the beer fridge will have to fend for itself the odd night. We pull into one of these at Balgal Beach, a super spot right by the sea, trouble is, every grey nomad in Queensland knows about it and it’s full to bursting. We drive on. Eventually we find ourselves at a site (not free) called Lucinda, just past Halifax! This is serious sugar cane country are there are vast fields of it, each having a narrow gauge railway running through it with loco’s they call trams pulling dozens of small containers full of sugar mulch. They use a similar machine to harvest it to the ones we use to harvest maize. It looks to be brought here to Lucinda, where there is an incredibly long jetty (6K’s) out to a deep harbour, where it is pumped/conveyor-ed into bulk carrier ships. Dunnow what Mr Tate and Lyle do with it when they get it! We have only travelled about 120Ks but it is very noticeable how much more tropical it is. We now know that pineapple is grown on or close to the ground, we always thought they grew on trees like coconuts. It’s a tropical fruit and lots are grown here. The weather is typically tropical, (music to follow) humid and damp. This may be mossie country.