Travellers' Checks | New Guinea: an Australian cruise offers the chance to explore ‘the last unknown’

About 3,000km southeast of Hong Kong lies New Guinea, the world’s second-largest island, after Greenland. Equally divided between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, more than twice the size of Japan, yet mostly unspoilt by tourism, it still largely lives up to its old sobriquet – The Last Unknown. Getting there from here is easy enough – Air Niugini flies from Hong Kong to the Papua New Guinean capital, Port Moresby, three times a week – but getting around New Guinea itself is anything but.

Paved roads are few and far between across the island, and there are no passenger railways. Next year, however, Australian cruise company Coral Expeditions will operate a one-off, full circumnavigation of New Guinea, providing a rare chance to explore the island’s coastline and rivers, as well as onshore excursions and cultural encounters. The new 120-passenger Coral Adventurer will set sail from Darwin, Australia, on October 2, but advance booking for the 35-night voyage is probably a good idea for such an unusual journey on a ship of this size, expensive though it is. All-inclusive fares start from about HK$134,000 per person, not including flights. Look for Circumnavigations on the Destinations menu at coralexpeditions.com for a full itinerary and other details.

A couple of books likely to fire the imagi­nations of potential passengers include New York Times bestseller Lost in Shangri-La (2011), by Mitchell Zuckoff, and Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest (2014), by Carl Hoffman. The first tells of the loss of a plane and its passengers during a sightseeing flight from Hollandia (now Jayapura), on the north coast of New Guinea, which led to what the author calls “the most incredible rescue mission of World War II”. The second is an investigation into the 1961 south-coast disappearance and probable killing and consumption by cannibals of the son of the former vice-president of the United States, Nelson Rockefeller.

Explore the homes of Hotel Chelsea’s lesser-known bohemians

Closed in 2011 and due to have opened as a luxury hotel last year, the still-scaffolding-clad property remains home to a number of legally protected, if lesser-known, full-time residents, whom the owners would no doubt love to evict. More than 20 of these tenacious and long-suffering “artists and intellectuals” and their “deliriously ornamental spaces” are featured in a new coffee-table book, Hotel Chelsea: Living in the Last Bohemian Haven, by Colin Miller and Ray Mock.