boats around PNG

Hi...

can anyone tell me if it is possible to travel around the whole coastline of PNG by boat?

People have asked a few times on this forum about travelling from Vanimo to Lae, so I guess that is possible, but is there also some transportation round the peninsula to Port Moresby? If anyone feels able to guess how long a journey from Vanimo Port Moresby could take, that would be interesting, though of course it's unpredictable.

What about the south coast? Any boats that continue towards the indonesian border? anyone has any experience of crossing this border?

thanks for your help

Good question. I don't think there is a regular ferry service from the north coast to Port Moresby. You can get all the way to Alotau from Vanimo and from there I think there may be irregular ferries to POM.

There are no ferries that I know of along the south coast from POM, just small banana boats but probably not all the way to the border. I don't think you can cross the border legally into Indonesia apart from Vanimo.

As above.
There is a border post at Sota (?) near Merauke in the South, but it is inland (so not for boats) and ASFAIK only open for locals living in the border region.

thanks for the replies...

if anyone else hears of anything, please let me know. So far i've got all the way from europe to the philippines without leaving the ground on an aeroplane, and just been offered the chance to go to png from here on a fishing boat, so i'm wondering whether to take it.

Incidentally, i will call the embassy about this, but do you think we would need to arrange visas in advance to show up in this way? yacht captains can apparantly just show up anywhere and get their visa at the customs point, but maybe it's not exactly the same...

Of course it is always safer to have a visa in advance, but without an air ticket you may not get one anyway.

BTW, if it is simply Indonesia and PNG you want to reach without flying, you could do much better by taking the boat from Mindanao to Sabah, then to Kalimantan, then onward through indonesia towards Papua, then cross from Jayapura to Vanimo.
This would all be easy and 100% legal.

Now, crossing by sea to AU could be more tricky...

hmm... yeah i know the other way to do it, but somehow crossing on a fishing boat seems like a cool adventure...