River Cruising / Scenic Float in October

The Essequibo is Guyana's liquid highway, and moving on it slowly is a reward in itself. Above the confluence town of Bartica the river spreads into a maze of forested islands, black-water creeks and old Dutch trading channels, and a scenic boat journey here threads between them at the pace of the current. This is not white water; it is a float past walls of rainforest where you scan the banks for kingfishers, herons, toucans and osprey, spot three-toed sloths hanging in riverside trees, and watch for the tucuxi river dolphins that surface in the wider reaches. Island resorts and creek landings break the journey for a swim in tea-colored water, a forest walk or a stop at Bartica's frontier market. The Essequibo has drawn river travelers since Walter Raleigh's day, and its lower island belt, an easy day or overnight from Georgetown, is the most accessible slice of Guyana's interior, big rainforest scenery without a long expedition in.

The Sepik is the Amazon of Papua New Guinea, a vast brown river looping through a floodplain of swamp, lakes and rainforest with no road along it, so the water is the highway and the village is the world. What draws travelers is the culture of its banks: the haus tambaran, tall spirit houses with soaring painted facades, the finest woodcarving in the Pacific, and initiation rites in which young men's backs are cut to scar like a crocodile's skin, marking the river's crocodile ancestor. You move by boat, either a shallow-draft cruiser on the tributaries and Blackwater Lakes or a motor canoe on the main river, stopping at villages to see carvers at work, spirit houses opened to visitors and daily life that still runs to the rhythm of the flood. It is one of the last places to witness a living river culture on this scale, remote, unhurried and reached only by water or light aircraft.

The journey to the base of Angel Falls is one of the great river trips in South America. You fly in to Canaima, a Pemon village on a red-water lagoon ringed by its own falls, and from there travel by curiara, a long motorised dugout canoe, up the Rio Carrao and into the Canyon of the Churun. For hours the boat threads between the vertical walls of the tepuis, the flat-topped mountains that gave Canaima its Lost World name, until Auyantepui rises ahead and the thread of Angel Falls appears down its face. A short forest walk from the river camp reaches a viewpoint and a pool at the base. The trip runs in the wet season, when the rivers are high enough to pass the rapids and the falls are in full flow, and most itineraries add nights at Pemon-run lodges in the Kamarata Valley. It is remote, weather-dependent expedition travel, and reaching the tallest waterfall on earth this way earns it.

A boat through the Kazan narrows, where the Danube squeezes between cliffs past the Roman Tabula Traiana and the rock-cut face of Decebalus on the Romanian bank.

The classic Uvac trip is a boat through the meanders to the ice cave and a climb to the Molitva viewpoint, where the river folds back on itself in an S you have seen even if you did not know where it was.