June 16-17 (Day 137-138) - Home Hill and Ayr

June 16

Home Hill is a quiet little town with a train line running through it. The showground is set back a block from the highway, but the train line runs right along side the showgrounds. This is preferable to being close to the highway, however, as there are only several rail services per day and during the trains they tend not to sound their horns!

The train line is primarily a freight line, but it seems to run a daily passenger service too. It seems a lot of these cane growing areas have a 'local' mill, as in every 100km or so, where the sugar cane is crushed and turned into cane sugar juice. Once crushed, this juice is loaded into stainless steel tanks on carriages and is then freighted by train down the coast to be refined into molasses, golden syrup, and all the other steps until you end up at plain white sugar. It is presumably cheaper to do this than carting the whole sugar cane down to a larger mill for processing, and then refining of the syrup.



The showgrounds has an old but serviceable toilet and shower block, and is quite decent for $20/night.

 

The geometrically very interesting bridge over the
Burdekin River, between Home Hill and Ayr

Jude with his Rubik's collection, holding
his latest acquisition!

While we'd been driving yesterday I'd been thinking about the magnet for the electric brakes and considered on reflection that it might be worth replacing just one and seeing how much of a difference that made. The caretaker at the caravan park had given us some good information about the local area, so we decided to drive about 10km into the next town of Ayr to have a look around. Mim went to an op shop while the kids and I went to Supercheap for a look around and got a few odds and ends for the caravan, and then down to Repco to get a new magnet. These were ticketed at about $68 but I was only charged $39! I pointed it out to the guy who said they must have been on special or something. So this was a nice bonus.

Once we were done there we went back to the op shop ourselves, where Jude bought himself a 3x2 Rubik's cube (well I guess it must be a Rubik's plate??!).

The kids have really enjoyed Rubik's cubes and various variations thereof. On our last trip, while we were in Perth a friend gave us a standard Rubik's cube (3x3x3) as a gift to take back home, and the kids really enjoyed nutting out the different algorithms to solve it. Since then Jude found a 2x2x2 cube, and now found this 3x2x1. So he has quite a collection now!

We also stopped at a shop called 'Silly Sollys' which advertised 'Nothing over $5!', so we had a poke around that. There wasn't a lot there but I did find an interesting-looking booked entitled 'Surviving Year Zero', which was an account of a boy who had survived Cambodia's rule by the Khmer Rouge. I have, disappointingly, found little time to read on our trip so I didn't really want to buy something else that might not get read, but this did look very interesting, and I remember an interesting talk Dan Maluga did at a Brighton ecclesial camp a few years ago on the Khmer Rouge's rule of Cambodia, so for $2 I decided to grab it. I have since read it (as has Bek, and Jude wants to), and while it is moderately graphic in some parts, in so far as it describes the occurrence of some of the many executions under the Khmer Rouge), it is an incredible account of those four years of horror, and the resourcefulness this little boy had (he was 13 when it started) in adapting to these circumstances and surviving. In some parts, it is not dissimilar to Flavius Josephus' account of Jewish life during the Roman siege of AD70. It certainly makes one very thankful for the peaceful life we have, and the plenty of food we enjoy.

Caravan Brakes

We had lunch, then headed back to the caravan park, and, while Mim had a sleep, I got on with trying the new electric brake magnet. The magnet surface on the drums wasn't perfectly smooth, but the new magnet made such a difference compared to the old one! With the old ones, you'd jack the wheel up, spin one wheel, put the brakes on full in the car, and the wheel would only slow down slightly more than with the brakes off. With the new magnet, it stopped immediately!

This was encouraging, so I did consider just buying some more magnets. However the van was booked in to have all four complete drum assemblies replaced, and while expensive this was an attractive option as it meant everything would be new. In the end I decided to see how it performed on the road with one good magnet on our way to Townsville, and make a decision from there as to what we replaced.

While I worked, Bek did some painting, Matt worked on a map he was drawing on one of the Surfaces of an island he'd created, and Jude amused himself with his Rubik's cubes.

During the evening we saw one of the cane fields being burned off nearby. In this part of Queensland they burn the cane to get rid of any dry material and also some of the moisture, as the nearby mill is about 100 years old and can't handle all the extra rubbish. This causes the local phenomenon of 'Burdekin snow', which is black ash from the fields that settles on all surfaces overnight, but blows off the next morning without a trace. While we were in Ayr we saw lots of this ash in the gutters and up against walls.

June 17

Mim, Matt and I went for a run in the morning to keep ourselves active, while the other two kids stayed in bed reading. Lazy bones'!

Today the caretakers took us across to a cane patch and cut down some sugar cane for us to try. We'd already tried a little a week or so ago but didn't know if what we'd tried was ripe. This stuff did taste pretty similar - sweet, with a mango taste and a celery texture. However once he was finished cutting a good amount of cane, he took us back to the caravan park where they had a very small sugar cane mill. This had two motorised wheels set a little way apart from each other which ran in opposite directions. The sugar cane is drawn in and crushed between the wheels, releasing most of its sap, which is the syrup from which sugar is derived.

Sugar cane juice!

The cane juice was OK, although being lukewarm it wasn't the nicest, so we took it back to the van and refrigerated it. Once the bits of cane were finished with, they took it to their resident pigs who had a good old munch and capped it off with a roll in the mud! A few days later we tried it cold in a 50:50 mix with soda water, plus a bit of lemon and lime juice, and it was delicious!

I can't rightly recall now what happened for the rest of the day so I will assume it was a quiet-ish afternoon, probably doing business work.

During two of our evenings here the kids found some wildlife! Bek found a big green tree frog in the toilets, but this was preferable to the giant cane toad the boys had discovered the night before, which duly met its demise!

-- Greg