Mmm.... I love Rum and Turtles

Quick! What do rum and turtles have in common? They’re both made in Bundaberg!

After our hairy experience in Fraser Island, both of us were pretty fried and needed some alone time before heading to our next social experiment in the Whitsunday Islands, so we decided to stay in a smallish town called Bundaberg. We stayed in an awesome little homestyle hostel run by a really nice older couple, and it was nice to have a quiet place to chill out for a few days. We used the downtime to catch up on our personal affairs – responding to long overdue emails, shopping for new clothes (our summer clothes in Canada suck compared to what they have down here. I just threw out a few shirts and shorts in favor of the awesome new style we got down here), and trying to fix our dead camera (update: our camera came back from the dead miraculously! We almost sent it in for warranty repair, but they wanted to charge us $100 just to look at it, so we kept it and hoped that it recovered. And it did!)

But the coolest thing we did was go down to a place called Mon Repos, where little baby turtles hatch on the beach and mothers lay their eggs at night. Without knowing, our mom-and-pop hostel was actually a pretty sweet hookup, as the guy who ran it was also a researcher at the Mon Repos hatchery, and the hostel did VIP tours there. So, the night we arrived, we hopped in his little van and headed down to the hatchery, all the while getting lectured on everything there is to know about turtles. The type of turtles we were about to meet were Loggerhead turtles, which we were told have a shell size of about 94 cm. That’s a big turtle! This beach also hatched Green Turtles and Flatback turtles, but in fewer numbers. All three of these species are endangered (actually all seven species of turtle in the world are endangered), but this research center helped their numbers by increasing their survivability and birth numbers.

We arrived at the hatchery and were put into group 1 because of our sweet hookup, which was good because that meant we got to see turtles first. They had to cap the number of people seeing turtles every night because they were getting over 800 people every night. They now cap it at 300, in groups of 50, and we were the first group.

All night long, there are rangers and volunteers patrolling the beach looking for turtles either hatching or laying eggs. This isn’t to allow tourists to see it (though it helps), but turtles actually require a lot of help and their ancient instincts are fairly retarded. Turtles are over 100 million years old, and it doesn’t seem their instincts have evolved much since then, as turtles routinely lay their eggs in dangerous places that won’t survive higher-than-normal tides. The rangers will actually dig up their nests and replace the eggs in a better location, safe from high tides. Also, upon hatching, all the baby turtles have to work together to dig themselves out of the nest, and if they hatch too late, many get left behind to suffocate in the nest under the sand. So after a major hatching, rangers will carefully dig up the nest and make sure all the little turtles make it into the sea, and to count the number of shells that actually hatched, so that they can monitor birth rates over a long period of time.

After waiting for about an hour, we got the call that a turtle was sighted heading up the beach to lay eggs. We had a random chance of seeing either an egg-laying or a hatching, and Kenna was delighted as she was secretly hoping to see a mother laying eggs. We headed down to the beach and came upon the mom who had already dug her hole and was leaned over the back, dropping little white ping-pong balls into the hole. We all huddled around her backside, watching the eggs being laid. Turtles have no peripheral vision and hear sound on a different frequency than human voices, so she didn’t even know we were there. After covering up her hole, the large turtle finally started slowly lumbering back into the sea, exhausted, taking long breaks on the way.

Our turtle was a bit above average, at 96 cm. The rangers tag and measure every single turtle on the beach, and compile a massive database that has been compiled over 30 years. To Kenna’s delight, the turtle had laid its eggs too far down the tide line, and the nest had to be relocated. The rangers dug up and counted the nest and then let every member of the audience relocate a couple of the eggs into the new nest further up the beach. It was pretty cool to hold a freshly laid egg and help a new little turtle survive. The egg felt a lot like a rubbery ping-pong ball.

After the relocation, we headed back to the amphitheatre and tried to avoid mosquitoes. Our in-the-know hostel guy told us that if we stayed long enough we could probably also witness a hatching, so we stayed right until they closed at midnight. We were pretty disappointed that we had waited almost 5 hours and they hadn’t spotted a single hatching. No baby turtles for us… and then, as we lost all hope, a ranger came over and asked us if we wanted to see a hatching! Excitedly, we hurried back to the beach where we met another ranger, who was holding 6 baby turtles. And this time there were only about 8 of us who had stayed to the bitter end. It wasn’t a true hatching, but the ranger had came upon an empty nest and dug it up, to find these few baby turtles who hadn’t made it. We held a few of them, then watched as he dropped them on the sand and watched them scurry back into the water. Apparently, this short time on the sand is incredibly important, as somehow their brain imprints their exact location of the Earth’s magnetic field, so that they can return to breed. Incredibly, a turtle will hatch on this beach, head straight for the East Australian Current which will take them all the way to South America, and after 30 years when they reach sexual maturity, they return to the exact same beach they were born on to reproduce.

Though we wanted to get to bed early after our crazy Fraser ordeal, we didn’t get back until about 1:30 am. Time for sleep.

Rum!

The other cool thing we did was head to the pride of Australia, the Bundaberg Rum Distillery. Here, they make just enough rum to support the massive drinking habits of the Aussies (they produce 600 million 700ml (26 oz.) bottles of rum annually, and 600 million cases of premix (Rum and Coke), and they only export 4% of it globally. That’s a lot of booze. Incidentally, 3% gets exported to New Zealand, and the other 1% goes to the Polynesian Islands and… randomly… Alberta. We tried to find the store in Alberta that sells it but if our guide found out, she left before she told us. A few years ago, they tried to increase production by 30% and enter the American market, but Aussies suddenly decided to drink 30% more rum, so they still don’t sell it anywhere in North America besides Alberta).
The factory itself is located next to a sugar refinery, which until 2000 used to own Bundaberg (they sold out to a massive conglomerate that owns Captain Morgan’s, Smirnoff, and about 500 other brands of booze). The sugar refinery refines all the sugar cane that grows in the area, and is the basis of what rum is made of.

It was really cool to see how they made rum, as I’ve been fascinated with the chemical process of how they make so many different types of booze from pretty much my first drinking days. First, they start out with molasses, which gets fermented for only about 36 hours, which is a really quick fermentation process. Then, they put it into a distillation vat, where most of the ethanol is distilled, and then into another distillation vat to further purify it, which produces immature rum with about 78% alcohol content. The rest of the fermented molasses and other biproducts are sent away for the sugar cane farmers to use as fertilizer, and to industrial alcohol plants for further refinement. Only about 10% of the flavor of this rum actually comes from the sugar cane, which really surprised me.

The real flavor actually comes from the aging process, where they store the rum in huge 75,000 L vats made of White American Oak (the same oak they use for aging wine) for at least 2 years. Apparently they’re the only rum that uses American Oak in their process, which gives it the distinctive flavor that we so much enjoy. The distillery has 22 million liters (300 vats) of this high-proof rum aging at any given time, and they’re expanding production, adding one new vat a week at $75,000 a piece. The oak for the vats is actually imported from the US (from the Appalachians on the border with Canada) and made into vats at a shop down the street, by the same family business that’s been building them for the last 80 years. The vats are made using no glue, only wood and steel beams that wrap the boards like they used to make wine barrels from. Oddly enough, they also don’t ever retire any vats – our tour guide claimed that their 80 yr old vats would age rum to the same quality that a new one would, which seems odd to me, since the flavor is derived from the tannins coming from the wood. You’d think the wood would run out of tannins, but I guess not.

We went into the warehouse where the rum was aging, and the smell was amazingly delicious, like thick sweet molasses, oak, and a tinge of alcohol. The whole area was surrounded by a tall electric fence, since each vat was worth $6 million, for a total of $1.8 billion of inventory at one time. Not all that is profit though – the government takes $4 million in taxes per vat right off the bat, and that’s even before they put it in bottles; consumers pay the tax every time they buy a bottle too.
So then they showed us the bottling plant, which would have been really cool if it had been working, but it appeared there was a glitch in the system cuz there were workers frantically checking equipment everywhere and nothing was moving.

After that – bar time! We got two free drinks, where we could sample the product. They made a rum liqueur that was awesome – sort of like Kahlua but way better. We were going to buy a bottle but, as much as we’re drinking on this trip, there’s no way we’d go through it in the two weeks we have left in Oz. They also make a few premixes, our favorite being the Dark and Stormy, which is a mix of rum with ginger beer (also made only in Bundaberg by a different company down the road. Ginger beer is kind of like ginger ale, with a lot more ginger, and it’s one of our favorite non-alcholic drinks in Oz).

All in all, it was super cool and I’m a big fan of Bundaberg for the awesome experiences we’ve had here. I’d highly recommend both tours if you’re ever in Bundaberg.

Now we’re on our way on a 10 hour drive to Airlie Beach, where we’ll spend a few days preparing for our Whitsunday Island tour. Let’s hope this tour is less of a reality show! The drive right now is incredibly boring, akin to driving across Sasketchewan, with probably even fewer small towns (we’ve passed exactly one small hamlet in the past 3 hours). At least they try to keep you entertained with funny road signs – “How long to go Dad?”, and “Are we there yet?”, “Still a long way to go, kids!”, and a while back we passed our personal favorite – “Little Beefy Milkers” for a dairy farm (that was back when we were somewhat close to civilization.) Mm fun.