Three day canoe-camping “safari” in the Cooloola Everglades
Cost: “Free” plus $69 in park fees and insurance
Difficulty: Might as well be a day trip

Everyone – and I mean everyone – who took the canoe trip up the Noosa River got it for free. Tribal Travel, an agency ubiquitous in Australia, is throwing it in when you book other classic tours like Fraser Island on a 4WD and sailing on the Whitsundays.

While they’re clearly trying to promote this lesser-known trip, it has two major problems: a) it’s not really free, and b) it totally acts like it’s free.

Point (a) is simply a matter of deceptive marketing. They give you the trip for no money up front but you have to pay $69 AUD in park fees and insurance to the tour operator. Tribal doesn’t see a cent, and so it’s free for them.

Promotional flyers for this trip price it at $140. So what you’re getting is a 50 percent discount on the advertised rate.

As for point (b), think back to the freebies you’ve been offered. A pen for signing up to a credit card. A crappy T-shirt. All of them of expendable quality.

The pointless part

A van picks you up from your Noosa hostel early in the morning and takes you to a lakeside station where a crater-faced fellow wearing – unironically – a trucker cap gives you two-seater canoes, tents, cooking stoves, and waterproof drums for your belongings.

He then hands you a crayon drawing of the lakes and rivers of the area. After a curt “See you in three days” he vanishes.

To call it a map would be a riotous overstatement. The river forks and splits in far more places than the doodle suggests, making it easy to turn into the wrong lake, turn around, and take another inlet to the same dead end.

This is a refreshing change from the excessively safe and controlled tours of the Queensland coast. Getting briefly lost in a tea-coloured river flanked by dense bush, one can almost call it an adventure.

But this laissez-faire approach goes too far when you learn that 1) when you arrive at your campsite at 2 pm, you will have the rest of the day to do precisely nothing at all, and 2) that park rangers patrol the camps and ask to see a camping permit, which the tour operator does not provide you with.

There are no walking trails around the campsite, nothing that would warrant arriving there so early. So one is left with two options: get back on the canoes, backtrack for one hour and explore the lakes we passed on the way, or start drinking.

Everyone chose the second option.

The Cooloola Sandpatch

The part that matters

The highlight of the trip is the second day, in which you paddle 1.5 hours upstream then hike for another 1.5 hours to the Cooloola Sandpatch. This is a huge erosion in the middle of the forest where winds hoarded enough sand to make it unlivable for plants. You can spend a good three hours wandering around and imagining it a lifeless desert with a gorgeous ocean view.

This three-day trip could easily be condensed into two: paddle up to the sandpatch, camp, come back the next day.

The third day is hardly a day at all. You are asked to report back to the lakeside station by 9:30 where no one is waiting. After roughly two hours spent killing mosquitoes for fun, the next batch of campers arrive, and you can finally return to your hostel in Noosa.

If the point of this promotional “freebie” is to popularize it by word of mouth, it can be deemed an absolute failure. When I asked other travelers if they too took the trip, many replied, “I was about to, but someone told me it wasn’t worth it.”

To the same extent as buyers, sellers also get exactly what they pay for.