Deane & Jack's Motorcycle Trip in
Australia and New Zealand
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Deane & Jack's Motorcycle Trip in Australia and New Zealand |
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April 11 - Cairns to Mackay, Queensland 761 km (472 Miles) |
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Sugar Cane, and Sugar Cane, and Sugar Cane! This morning we rode on wet roads and with spitting rain for about 100 miles, but it wasn't bad, and the day's ride was quite enjoyable. The first part had some hill riding, and then fields and fields of Sugar Cane that we had seen before, getting to Cairns. There is just one road to get there, so you have to reverse direction to come back out. But everything is green - green - green! Just beautiful to a couple of desert rats from Albuquerque. The thing that amazed us, though, was the extent of Sugar Cane fields. We rode for 400+ miles through field, after field, after field. I am raising my estimate from yesterday, that the size of the sugar cane fields is in the thousands of acres, to my guess today that the size of the overall sugar cane fields is in the tens of thousands of acres!! Of that 400 miles riding in cane fields, more than 150 miles was spent on the main road that has cane fields almost solid on both sides of the roads. The only breaks were for farm houses or little towns. The other fields had larger breaks between fields, but had just as large fields. And neither of us had any idea that Australia produced so much sugar - Hawaii doesn't hold a candle to Australia in this product!! Here's a view of cane fields that go on forever.
We also saw three big sugar processing plants, none running at present because the cane wasn't ready for harvest. I would guess these plants do the process of extracting the sugar, and that somewhere else it would be refined and packaged. I say that because there were railroad cars of a tank design close to these plants, which made it look like the sugar output was by the tank car load!! It's interesting how many mountains and mountain ranges there are along this northeast coast, and they are beautiful! Anyone who thinks Australia is just flat, hasn't been around the continent very much. As to how far we've ridden, today we passed the 7,000 mile mark (11,000 km mark). While we were fueling at a little town, we saw this automobile dealership for "Holden" and "Crossley".
We've been seeing really sleek pickups, like the orange one, and wondered what make they were. They are Holden's.
This model reminds me of my 1977 Chevy "El Camino". I called that my "gentleman's" pickup. and this one looks like a "gentleman's pickup". These are very popular here, and we think they are manufactured in Australia. We don't know what the "Crossley" brand looks like, with this being the first time for seeing that name. |
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