Advertisement
Published: December 14th 2022
1. Big Crab
The Big Crab, Miriam ValeWe’ve covered just over 500km’s today, taking around 10 hours door to door! It was a very long day!
Back on the Bruce Highway, they were right about it being very long! We set off from Gladstone this morning and drove all the way to the Bundaberg Rum Distillery without any stops, there isn’t really much to see or do on this road! Although we did spot a large crab on the top of a building at Miriam Vale and passed through a place called ‘Gin Gin’ – which sounded like our kind of town!
It seemed like we were being chased by grey clouds today, and we even had a few spots of rain on the windscreen. At one point we even had to close the windows! But not for long. It was still pretty hot and humid though, it was already 29 degrees when we set off from the underground car park first thing this morning!
When we arrived in Bundaberg, we parked up at the rum distillery and walked in, just as it was starting to rain, then booked ourselves onto the 1pm tour. We were thankful we’d picked an indoor activity for today as
2. Gin Gin
Now that's our sort of place! the dark grey clouds had finally caught up with us, and it was looking pretty ominous out there!
There was 30mins before our tour so we started to explore the museum telling you all about the history of the distillery as well as the process of sugar production. They revamped this area a few years ago and it’s pretty impressive. After missing out on Sabrina Sugar Shack it was great to finally see how all the sugar cane we’ve been seeing for the past few days is processed and how it’s used.
Out the back of the museum bit was a very large wall of glass fronted cabinets, displaying many of the bottled rum’s they’ve produced over the years, it reminded me a bit of the whisky experience place in Edinburgh.
This led to a cinema room, which is where we needed to be to start out tour, so we took a seat and watched the video playing on the big screen giving more information about the day to day running of the distillery.
While we were sitting watching the film, a roaring noise started up making it difficult to hear it – it was so
3. Bundaberg Distillery
Impressive entrance to the Bundaberg Rum shop and tour loud! Then the door to the outside world opened as a staff member walked in and it was monsoon like out there! The rain was torrential and had already flooded the bit outside the door.
Thank goodness we didn’t have to go out in that! Especially with our flip flops on!
Then the door opened again for another staff member (who were now all wearing large waterproof jackets!) and we spotted a wheely bin full of umbrella’s….. so it appears we would be going outside after all!
The tour began, everyone got a large ‘hurricane’ umbrella to use for the duration. We had to put all our belongings into a locker as this is classed as a food production factory and some area’s were highly flammable (hence the fact it’s burned to the ground twice in it’s history!). So no phones, camera’s, watches – which means no photo’s of the tour itself.
We had to wade across the flooded road and train tracks to get to the buildings. At least it was only our feet getting wet in the muddy puddles, the lady wearing brand new, pure white Van’s wasn’t as lucky!
The first stop
4. Bundaberg Distillery
A bottle of Bundaberg Original on display was the molasses store room, they only farm sugar cane for 6 months of the year, so they have to store up the molasses in order to produce Rum all year round. All of the molasses used comes from the sugar production plant alongside the distillery, who in turn only use local cane. It was a huge room with dark brown sludge stored in cement pools which were 5m deep. Pretty gross to be honest! When you came out you got a taster on a wooden stick, like the last bit of an ice lolly, except this tasted a bit like licorice! Roy loved it and probably would’ve drunk from the squeezy bottle had he been allowed to – although probably just as well he didn’t as it has laxative effects if you have too much!
After that we were taken around the different vats/pipes/chambers used in the production and the process was explained. You get to see bottled samples of each of the stages, including the dregs (dunder – because they scrape it off the bottom, or ‘down under’ – d-under – they like to shorten things over here!). They had a sample bottle of the crystal clear
5. Cane Train Museum
This mini cane train was going round in the museum 75% proof liquid, this then goes through a second distilling and they only take the best vapour reducing it to 27.5%, they then place it into barrels for a couple of years to get its flavour and colour.
The finale was a tasting session, where they kindly explained how much you could get away with drinking before being over the drink drive limit!
Roy had Solera (the posh one - $190 a bottle!), and a small batch coconut reserve rum, straight up with just a bit of ice. I had the coconut one too, but with pineapple juice, and a small batch spiced with lemonade. The barman also gave me an extra taster of the salted caramel rum liquor, which was also very nice!
We perhaps should’ve had lunch before all the booze, but instead had our rolls in the car park before setting off to continue our journey down to the Sunshine Coast. This was another long stint in the car, with very little to see on the way except groves of Macadamia and Avocado trees – not that we had time, it was already predicting a 6:15pm arrival time and we still had to find
6. Bundaberg Rum Wall
The museum had an impressive Rum cabinet a place to stay for the night.
You’d think somewhere called the Sunshine Coast would have plenty of motels right? Apparently not! Well not the parts we drove round anyway. Even booking.com was struggling to find something that didn’t require the accommodation to send through instructions for lock boxes – which isn’t ideal when you want to get in straight away. We ended up at the airport motel at 7pm, it was getting late and already quite dark outside! We were pleasantly surprised to find a very helpful and friendly man at the desk who was very welcoming. The motel is actually quite nice, it has everything we needed and it’s really well looked after, it even has a swimming pool.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.071s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 10; qc: 29; dbt: 0.0503s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb
