The mild diversion of finding ourselves a safe, secure, half reasonably priced hotel aside, we were in Wewak for a reason. This is the launch point for pretty much all of the trips down the Sepik river, a place renowned both for its beauty and for its isolation from the outside world. If you want to see this and you don’t want to actually paddle your own canoe, Wewak is the place to arrange for someone else to do so (well, to chuck a 40 HP motor on the back – same principle).

We had in Madang had a very brief introduction to logistics in PNG. The internet rarely works, so email is out, and people typically don’t answer their phones. This presents certain impediments to establishing contact with the middlemen to whom you wish to pay vast quantities of money such that they can find you your canoe. Fortunately, having been dropped by the Good Samaritans in the only good hotel in town we had a massive advantage here in that most of the middlemen swing by during the course of any given morning. With the exception that is of the middleman we’d come here expecting to speak to (he’s the only one mentioned in the Lonely Planet so our hopes were rather hanging on him), who was upriver and out of contact. [As an aside, we later heard – scurrilous gossip – from a tour guide in Kumul that the guy has now become fairly intolerable after years of being top dog and now can’t be bothered to sort out the small stuff for you. Like food. Close escape?]

First up then: a guy called Chris Karis. Young and pretty presentable (teeth weren’t betel stained, clothes were whole-ish and clean-ish, but exhausted and expensive. Couldn’t really be bothered to give us any detail on what we’d do and where we’d go, but happy to tell us that it would cost us about $3,000 for 3 days upriver. Cue enormous gulp from James and I. We sought other alternatives.

This appeared in the form of one gentleman called Seby. Not quite so presentable this time (dirty clothes and filthy teeth), but willing to give us both a detailed itinerary and a cheaper price – down to about $2,200 for 4 days upriver through both slightly cheaper prices all round and the removal from the quote of the transfer back from the river at $400 one way. [You’ll hear more about that later…..]. We were sold – albeit with further big gulps – we were just a tiny bit over budget here…. And not at all nervous when we ran into Chris Karis again later, told him who we were headed upriver with, and he nearly choked….

Payment, of course, is in cash. Half as soon as we agreed terms (they very kindly dropped us at the bank to pick it up) and the remainder the following morning as they picked up food and we prepared to set off. Frankly at this point, we were so delighted not to have been proven to be the unwitting victims of a total scam that we maybe didn’t notice tiny little pointers that Seby might not have been quite so well organized as he could have been. Maybe our $400 ride up, in a knackered old minibus that gasped up every hill should have warned us…

Still, we were on our way!

[We finally make it to the river – James helping pump our US$500 drum of fuel into the boat]