Turtles in Bargara and A Whole Lot of Bundaberg Rum

This past weekend we travelled a few hours south of us with some friends – our first official road trip since moving to Australia!  Our agenda for the weekend…to see baby turtles hatch on the beaches of Bargara and to make our own rum at the Bundaberg rum factory.

 

Bargara, a suburb of Bundaberg, is a small town on the coast about 4 hours south of Yeppoon. Its main attraction is Mon Repos Conservation Park, which has the largest population of marine turtles on the east coast of Australia. The park works hard to protect the turtles because almost all of the species here are either threatened or already endangered. From November to January, the turtles haul themselves up the beach to lay their eggs. Then in January and February, the hatchlings emerge from their nests deep in the sand.

 

Some of the cool things we learned about turtles is that they live 60-80 years. They return to the beach where they hatched to lay their eggs, but they don’t generally nest until they are about 30 years old! When the turtles do come into nest, they will dig a hole and lay about 100 eggs and they will do this a number of times across the nesting season. They then don’t lay eggs again for about 3 years.

 

It was incredible to watch the hatchlings work their way up from the sand and toward the sea. They were so much smaller than I expected (only 5-7cm) and their little flipper were super strong. When they emerge from the sand, they use the small amount of light on the horizon over the ocean to find their way to the water so we weren’t really able to take a lot of pictures because the light would have sent them in the wrong direction. However, the rangers do take around a few of them for people to see and touch before turning all the lights off again so they can find their way. Here are a few pics:

 

And here’s a short video:

 

 

Although the hatchling emerge at night, we heard that you can sometimes see some stragglers early in the morning so we got up early both mornings so we could make it back to Mon Repos beach by 6am when it re-opens to the public. Sadly, we didn’t see any hatchlings. But we did find a bunch of egg shells on the beach:

And our early morning walks resulted in beautiful views like this:

 

On Saturday afternoon, we headed off to Bundaberg to tour the Bundaberg Rum Distillery. The history of the distillery was super interesting. It was nice to hear about how the factory has worked to give back to the community of Bundaberg which has had significant damage from two separate floods only a few years apart.

 

After the tour, a small group of us went off to the Blendatorium to blend our own rum – such a cool experience. We were given 5 different types of rum to taste and then got to experiment with different combinations of them to find a blend of our own that we liked.

Once you decide your blend, you use a beaker to measure the amount of each type and fill your own bottles. Each bottle is labelled with the name of your choice.

Then the guides seal the bottles and give you a fancy bag to take them home in. And just in case you didn’t get your fill of rum while experimenting with the different blends, you then head up to the tasting bar for a few more free samples. Cheers!