Day 4 – Fancy some Bundi?

We’ve all become accustomed to the early starts; this was made obvious today by the fact that we were all up and packed and ready to leave our Hervey Bay accommodation an hour before we had planned. Today we moved up to Bundaberg. We had an hour and a half to drive, and I still had yesterdays blog to finish, so I managed to make use of the time and catch up! From what I did see when I looked up from my laptop was vastly different scenery than I had been seeing the days prior. We drove through patches of thick forest, lush fields of sugarcane and areas of red volcanic dirt covered in termite mounds.

It didn’t feel like too long before we were at the new hotel, dropping our luggage off and heading to our first point of call today. At 11.30, we headed to the Bundaberg Rum Distillery to explore the museum and tour around the grounds. The decor of the museum was exactly my favoured aesthetic, with most things made of wood; many of the exhibits here housed inside retired vats, which used to hold the ageing rum.

We met up with our tour guides and they lead us through some areas of the distillery, giving us information on the manufacturing process, and even showing us (and letting us taste) their molasses reserve. This shed smelt amazing, and when we went inside, I was truly shocked by just how large, and how much this hand dug pool of molasses held. We were told that this single tank was only about half filled, but has the capacity to hold between 2-4 million litres of it! I can’t imagine how sticky everything gets in there… At the end of the tour, we were able to sample two of their range of rums included in the fee. I’ve never really been a rum drinker, but they were quite nice.

Next up we had a tasting booked at “The Barrel”, which gave us a chance to try the range of 13 flavours of Bundaberg soft drink. We do drink this at home, so Drew and I had already tried a few, but we were able to try a few flavours we hadn’t even heard of before, which was interesting. Once the tasting was over, we were able to walk through their small museum, which had some information on the actual manufacturing of the drinks – watching the conveyor belts and robots do their thing was very interesting. Before leaving, as part of the tasting we were able to make up a 6 pack of flavours of our choosing to take home.

By this time it was about 3 o’clock, and we had some time where we could squeeze in another activity. Amy had the idea to head to Alexandra Park, which also had a free pubic zoo. It was small, but there was a nice variety of animals you could see, from wallabies, cockatoos and reptiles, to emus, dingos and tamarin monkeys. I had given up the idea of seeing dingos when we didn’t see any on K’gari, but I’ve somehow managed to see them every day since! Not quite like seeing them in the wild, but I just can’t get enough of these “danger puppies”.

And that brings us to now. We’ve just finished up having an early dinner, I’m finishing up this blog and then we’re heading to bed to try and get some sleep before our 5.40 alarms tomorrow morning. We’re heading off to Lady Musgrave Island to tick another UNESCO site off the bucket list!