walked out to the nearest village. They asked that if the boat resurfaced they be contacted and they would pay a reward of 100 kina (equivalent to about $40 USD, or approximately 10 times what the average lo- cal worker makes in a day). A few days later, they received a call that the
boat had been found and some kids were run- ning 10 kilometers to town to meet the kayak- ers and return it and collect their reward. “It turns out, they’d been swimming un-
der the rock with ropes attached to them to get the boat out,” says Searle. “A lot could have gone very wrong with that.”
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FOR ANYONE LOOKING for an easy vaca- tion, PNG is not the first choice. It occupies the eastern half of the island of New Guin- ea, the world’s largest and highest tropical island. Though it’s a basin for bio-diversity,
The welcoming committee in Gembogl Station (top left), the Chimbu is surrounded by verdant remote jungle (center), Searle perfects his limbo technique in front of a crowd (top right), locked and loaded for a two- day ride to the river (bottom right), the Chimbu flows alongside many remote communities—an unparalleled cultural experience (bottom left).
PNG is generally regarded as a high-risk destination for tourists and has been the subject of unsavory press about sorcery kill- ings, cannibalism and high crime rates. In just 100 years, the people of PNG have
fast-forwarded from stone to steel to sili- cone—it’s a country where many people who have cell phones still cook over fires. “We wanted to go because no one had been
there,” says Searle, adding that the country’s mountainous topography and wet climate promised a great kayaking destination. “At the same time, there’s a huge cultural hurdle to get over. There’s no tourism, no precedent,
no system—that’s part of the adventure.” PNG’s rivers aren’t the toughest on earth,
but Young says they have “some of the best whitewater in the world,”—and he’d know. A jet-setting kayaker, he paddled the Sti- kine four times over the summer of 2013 and is one of the few to paddle all 13 classic High-Sierra runs. “It’s the full-on nature of the country that has stopped people from going,” he says. The difficulty of logistics, combined with the cultural experience and lack of river beta makes PNG rivers un- doubtedly epic—a paddling destination like no other.
www.rapidmag.com | 31
PHOTO: ARI WALKER
PHOTO: BARNY YOUNG
PHOTO: BARNY YOUNG
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