The Cane Train

Monday 9th July

It's goodbye Cairns today as we head north up the Captain Cook Highway to Port Douglas, an hours drive on a road clinging to the edges of the Coral Sea. As holiday routes go, it knocks the Cornish section of the A30 into a cocked hat.

As I've mentioned before, they grow sugar cane up here in Far North Queensland. Both times we've been here it's been mid July, the height of the cane-crushing season, which is when they cut it all down and load it into cages on little narrow-gauge railways.

Then the cane trains wind their way across the fields and across the main roads at little unmanned crossings to sugar mills like the one at Mossman (open for visitors but alas, not visitors with children under five years old), where they boil it up and make all sorts of things out of it, no doubt including Cadbury's Dairy Milk chocolate, which seems a lot of effort to go to for something so plainly wrong.

They even have public information films on telly at this time of year warning people to watch out for the cane trains, which are all named after famous prostitutes who serviced the needs of the men who worked the cane industry in nearby Mossman back in the days of old.

Here's some photos I took as we drove up to Port Douglas today. This is Ivy, which puts me in mind of Ivy Tildesley from Coronation Street and the late great Lynne Perrie and conjures up all sorts of horrible images about the era of prostitution in this far colonial outpost that I really wish it hadn't.