Hervey Bay

1st February, Hervey Bay and Gympie, Australia

Ian writes:

After a couple of hours driving this morning, we got to Hervey Bay and stopped off at a shopping mall for a short while, partly to get something to eat but also to let Ethel cool down. Then we continued on, leaving the just-out-of-town warehouse shopping centres for the actual bay.

The Esplanade in Hervey Bay is a pretty little area, catering well for visitors but not so overdeveloped that it's become crass and ugly. The bay is best known for its other visitors, those being the whales that stop in during migration season and play in the waters before moving on. Why they choose this bay isn't known. Unfortunately, it wasn't migration season, so we didn't get to see any today.

We had a few drinks on the Esplanade in a bar where the pavement seats were made from the back ends of old American cars. All very good, but there was nowhere to rest your drink on those fancy, flaired rear wings!

We took a look at a room in this place (it also had an adjoining backpackers hostel) but it was a bit bland, so we passed on that and decided to carry on driving for a while longer (it was only 3:30pm anyway, so it seemed a little too early to stop travels). The downside to this was that we missed our opportunity to get to Fraser Island (or at least easily), as Hervey Bay is one of the main ferry routes to the island. We discovered this only once we settled for the night in a place called Gympie (I kid you not) and looked at a few flyers. From Gympie onwards, getting to Fraser was going to be more expensive or the trips more limiting in what you can see in one day. Perhaps we should have parked ourselves in those car seats for a while longer instead?