Sugar, sugar

Having stayed in Cairns just long enough to make day trips to the west and east, it's time to get some wheels and head north. The mountains run parallel with the coast, and for about 90 kilometers - as far as the Daintree River - there is a coastal plain. Tarmacked road continues for another 50 kilometers north, squeezed in between the mountain slopes and the ocean, as far as Cape Tribulation. I have a campervan for a week, and the plan is to drive up to Cape Tribulation, visiting some of the World Heritage rainforest along the way, and then come back south of the Daintree River and head inland onto the Atherton Tableland before circling back to Cairns.

The coastal plain was cleared for agriculture in the later 19th century. To a first approximation, there is just one crop: sugar cane. The field in the foreground has been cut, but behind and slightly to the left, the cane is still standing. In the distance, the mountain slopes are covered with rain forest.

Although sugar cane cultivation extends a considerable way north and south, there is one town - Mossman - that is the centre of sugar cane cultivation, by virtue of having the only sugar cane mill. The chimney, and its rather dirty cloud of smoke, dominates the small settlement.

There are one or two characteristic style buildings in the town. This one is confusingly called the Daintree Inn, although the various places with the name Daintree are a bit further north.

The sugar mill was opened in 1897, with a two foot gauge tramway to the wharf on the Mossman River. By 1899, tramway had been completed from the sugar fields to the mill, and the extensive network is still the means by which all cane from the surrounding region is brought to the mill. This section of tramway cuts through the centre of town and across the main road.

The empty trucks are left on sidings next to the crop, and the farmers fill them directly, before they are collected up again into a train and taken back to the mill: