About an hour and a half south-east of the Atherton Tablelands is the beautiful Mission Beach area. We started the day at Charley’s Chocolate Factory – one of the only chocolate producers in Australia who make chocolate from the tree to the chocolate bar. We arrived for our 10:30am tour, along with quite a few other people. From the outside, it doesn’t look like much – they just have a big, open shelter that we sit under, and most of their production is done in a couple of large “site sheds” that have been converted for the purpose. But as you get into the tour, and you remember that it’s a working chocolate farm and factory, the exterior fades away and we got to understand just how authentic the experience was and how passionate they are at producing great chocolate. One of the owners, Chris, lead the tour, and started by talking us through the process they had to go through to get their cocoa trees growing, which included a walk past their cocoa tree nursery and their mature cocoa trees.
We then headed back into their shed and sat at some tables and Chris talked us through the 13 steps it takes to getting the fruit off the cocoa tree to creating a chocolate bar. After the cocoa fruit is separated from the pod, fermented and then sun dried, you’re left with really stable cocoa beans that can actually be stored for quite a long time. We got a chance to actually taste the cocoa nibs inside those cocoa beans – it was a really interesting taste! Not at all bitter like you’d expect – but really earthy, and a strong cocoa taste. We all mostly liked it – except for Alexander, who really, really didn’t like it! Poor guy also went on to not really like any of the chocolates we tasted either.
Next came the bit we were all keen for: chocolate tasting! We even got our own tasting sheet with notes for all 8 chocolates we were going to taste. There was such a variety – dark and milk chocolates, and also chocolates with local produce added as well (such as macadamia, Davidson Plum, ginger, etc). Their dark chocolates were just amazing, and that really surprised me. But Chris explained that the dark chocolate we’re used to in the supermarkets is mostly from West Africa, where the cocoa has a far more bitter taste. As well as the chocolates made entirely there at the farm, they also produce some chocolate using cocoa nibs that they’ve imported from PNG, which was also delicious. In the end, we bought way too many bars of chocolate from them – but they were all so delicious! And we loved that we were supporting a completely Australian chocolate business too.
We continued down the hill into the main Mission Beach area to find some lunch. We grabbed some fish and chips – fish burgers for Daniel, Debbie and I, and some calamari and fish on its own for Alexander and Eliza – and went and sat down at a table in the park right on the beach at Mission Beach. It had been raining on and off for most of the morning (actually, pretty much since midnight last night), but as we arrived in Mission Beach it actually had stopped and a bit of blue sky had started to appear! After lunch we wandered along the beach for a little while with our feet in the water. The kids also had a great time trying to, and succeeding, at cracking open a coconut.
Before we headed back home, we had to stop in at another big thing – the Big Cassowary, of course!
Tomorrow we pack up again and we’ll say farewell to the beautiful Atherton Tablelands – yet another area we could’ve stayed far longer in and explored more. The journey continues down the Queensland coast toward Townsville and Magnetic Island tomorrow!
