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.

When they can’t be bothered with sound discipline, it’s customary for parents to scare their children with fantastic lies.

In Brazil, for example, children are told that if they play with fire they will wet their beds, or that cockroaches will lick their mouths at night if they neglect to brush their teeth.

And there’s the mammoth childhood lie, one that crosses many cultures and is so ridiculous that its survival is nothing less than a miracle: that a fat old man in the North Pole is monitoring every child and delivers obedience rewards on a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer.

By 8 am the sunlight starts to slither in the window, lazy as we. The windows are fogged and dotted with condensation from a 10-hour sleep. We crack open the curtain to see it it’s raining (almost never) or sunny (almost always).

From the window we can see the sea, the grass, the asphalt, the neighbours or the mountain. The most important decision to be taken presents itself: have breakfast here or drive to a prettier or more intimate backdrop? If we’re lucky there’s a bathroom nearby. Other times we ned to hold it in and brush our teeth with water from a collapsible gallon.

New Zealand, is after all, the land of extreme sports. So it’s only fitting that taking risks is integral to the culture experience.

Instead of buying a car an sleeping in backpacker hostels every night, we decided on a campervan that converts into a bed. Bonus: you have your meals with a different natural landscape every night.

You can even give it a nickname and, if you’re a child of the 80s like us, you might fully realize your fantasy of living like a hippie for a month.