Rather than go back the way we came, our place of choice to recover from the sand of Fraser Island was Gympie. We stayed at a caravan park for a couple of nights to clean up, brush the sand off all our gear and catch up with some photo processing and blog work. We chucked a heap of our gear in the sand to access our recovery equipment during The Great Bogging so it all needed to be de-sanded.

Gympie has some nice old buildings and pubs. It seems Queensland does a good job at restoring and maintaining their heritage buildings. We had a walk through town to check out some of the history and we went to the Gympie Museum. The museum is huge, spread over a large area across many buildings and displays. There’s heaps of historic buildings, history about Gympie, gold mining, railway, farming, vintage cars and old stuff. If old stuff is your thing then allocate a whole day to the Gympie Museum. To give you an example of how much they have on display, there is a whole room dedicated to old dental stuff and another room dedicated to old typewriters. Not just one display or one shelf, but whole rooms dedicated to certain old things. They have a shelving unit displaying bed pans which I looked at with great interest as I considered my options for the roof top tent. Coming down the ladder to take a leak is just too arduous.

There’s a water hole near Gympie that we checked out but it was too dry and stagnant to swim in. The winter sees it fill and become a nice swimming hole. The directions provided on tourist information booklets for getting to the Gympie water hole were poo. The water hole is located south west of town on Hill Road. Catch Noosa Road off Brisbane Road in town and follow it through it’s various turns and intersections out of town until you reach Hill Road. Turn down Hill Road and the water hole day use area is located at the end. Apart from the water hole there’s gas bbqs, toilets, picnic tables, walking trails and 4WD tracks.