River Cruising / Scenic Float in June

The Indian River tour is the gentlest, most atmospheric hour in Dominica, a slow row up a protected mangrove river into the coastal rainforest. Motors are banned inside the reserve, so a local guide rows you upstream by hand from the river mouth at Portsmouth, and the quiet is the point: the only sounds are the oars and the birds. The lower river is walled by huge buttressed bwa mangue swamp-bloodwood trees whose roots splay out across the banks and arch overhead into a green tunnel, and in their shade you spot herons, egrets, kingfishers, land crabs and iguanas. Fans know the river as a Pirates of the Caribbean location, the swamp shack built here for Tia Dalma, the witch character in Dead Man's Chest, and guides point out where the set stood. The row usually pauses at a rustic riverside bush bar deep in the greenery for a rum punch before drifting back down on the current. It is not adventure so much as immersion, a short, cheap, richly guided float that reads the ecology and history of the coast, and an easy counterpoint to the island's hard hikes and dives.

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 travellers 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-draught 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.