Sarina in the Sugar Cane Fields

Sarina is a town you would normally drive through and think “Sarina” that’s a pretty name rhymes with ballerina.  But we stopped and stayed at a beach just out of Sarina called Armstrong’s Beach.

The night before we stayed at a place called BarraCrab because Pete liked the name, I think he thought he would definitely catch a Barra there.  Let me just say they should take the second b out of their name and replace it with a p.

Back to Sarina, this is sugar cane country. We went on a tour of the Sugar Shed where all things Sugar Cane was explained to us.  How they plant it to how and when it is harvested. The sugar cane is planted as a 15cm piece of cane.  You would think it is planted in a uppy down fashion.  But its not, its planted flat as in horizontal.  They have just started the harvesting season, Peter remembers as a boy the sugar cane fields being burnt but this does not happen any more.  It is harvested with the BIG harvesters I mentioned in another blog.  Here abouts the cane is then loaded onto a little Cane train and trained of to the mill.  There are train tracks everywhere.  There seems to be more train tracks than roads.  We did learn all about the milling, but that is way technical to talk about in a blog.

We then went to the Hay Point Coal Port.  We have seen long trains carting the coal.  Well they all go to this coal port where the coal is loaded onto ships.  Some of the trains are 2km long and may have 5 engines powering them along.    At the coal port there are massive mountains of the coal waiting to be shipped.  The wharf that the ships dock at is almost 2  km long.  Tugs boats are used to bring he ships in and then helicopters are used to guide them out through the reef.  Unfortunately for us there was no action when we where there but it would have been something special to see, especially for one certain little Red Elephant.