Ramu River, Papua New Guinea

The Ramu River flows nearly 400 miles across northern Papua New Guinea, meandering from its headwaters in the Kratke Range all the way to the Bismarck Sea. Surrounded by intact tropical rainforest and swampland, the remote river is considered sacred to and the lifeblood of a scattering of small settlements in the Madang Province, where inhabitants reside in grass huts on stilts and depend on the river, rainforest and small farms for their survival. While the Ramu is largely unnavigable, locals use canoes to travel between villages and farmland. Join your Seabourn Expedition Team members for a Zodiac expedition along the serpentine waterway, experiencing the region’s incredible biodiversity that includes numerous Australasian marsupials—including tree kangaroos—more than a dozen endemic or near-endemic mammal species, a variety of wild orchids, and birds of paradise seen nowhere else. Stop at a few villages to meet with the locals and learn about their culture and traditional lifestyle, perhaps watching them catch fish with hand-woven traps, create intricately carved garamuts (slit-drums), or perform their unique tribal dances.