A grouping of island emerge out from the Coral Sea ‘ The Whitsunday islands generally have deep blue sea and smooth waves.
This is the picture from our daily newspaper.
This is as close to blue as it’s gonna get today! This is another tender port for us. The boats are down and ready for us.
See the clouds? I had hoped the skies would open up and give us lots of sunshine but not going to happen.Our tout today is a bus ride through the area and since there’s rain on the way we decided this will be perfect for us.
Our drive knew of a little spot at the top of the hill for a nice view of the harbor. He took a big bus up the road through a residential neighborhood where there were signs for local traffic only… this is gonna be a great ride!! When you get a tour driver who isn’t afraid to break a few little rules the trip usually holds a lot of fun! Our bus drove us out of town and headed us to the larger neighboring town. Prospering is a town of 3,562 people. The main industry is sugar cane growing. 
Sugar cane fields
More fields. 
In the front of this picture you can just see the narrow gauge railroad tracks. The sugar cane is loaded on a narrow gauge rail and transported into Prosperine to the mill where it is processed and then sent all over the world( mostly Asia)
The harvest season goes about 4-6 months. This field has been harvested. Sugar cane will regrow annually. There is no need to burn the fields any more as there are harvesters that can handle the leaves now. The burning was to kill any bacteria and get rid of the leaves so harvest could be easier. No longer needed.
This was a surprise! Coffee bushes! There were a few fields of coffee bushes. There isn’t a local market for so don’t have any idea how it tastes.
The local hospital is in Prosperine. There are few actual services in Airlie Beach. They have a medical clinic but everything else come to Prosperine
If you look close, the windows of this house are louvered. The man who developed the louvered windo lived here and developed them due to the dust coming in the air from the cane fields. Unfortunately another man developed a better mechanism for opening and closing them, got a new patent and the original inventor got nothing economically from his invention.
This entire house had louvered windows throughout.
Downtown Prosperine. It was raining by now so no one wanted to stop. This hotel struck me.. Art Deco and named the Prince of Wales Hotel..
This is a long line of the cane train cars
Okay, the next few picture you will need to look very hard..Wallabys and Kangaroos!
Back in Airlie Beach we drove by a small private airport. Wouldn’t you know it was very busy… With the shooting of an Australian TV drama mystery!
The private airport also had homes with their own airplane garages and their own helicopters sitting out.
Our last overlook at the harbor. The rain stopped and the water tried to show how beautiful blue turquoise it can be. This was just a very short port stay. We have been here in 2019 so knew what we were going to experience. Instead of walking around down the little Main Street, Al wanted to head back to ship.. His bridge partner was waiting for their daily game!As we left the harbor, the clouds descended and we couldn’t see any of the 74 islands in this cluster as we headed to Cairns . Tomorrow we head from Cairns up into the jungle!
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