PNG or New Guinea Tribe experience and airfare from SE asia Cost

I will be travelling South East Asia in the fall/winter and Ive been looking into PNG or New Guinea. I will be starting in India and over to Vietnam

SO question is, what is the cheapest way of getting there from say, Vietnam? Im looking into the possibility of getting to Kulua Lumpur or Singapore and flying from there.

My goal in PNG or New Guinea would to be live/visit a truely primitave tribe, preferably The Korowai would be ideal as i love my tree houses and ive done a lot of research on their way of living and love how they do things. Ive read a few articles about possibly getting a Tin TIn boat for much cheaper than the $2000 speed boat thats out there. If this option is just too expensive for a solo traveller, What are some other tribes that live relatively similar at cheaper costs. I dont like tours. I would rather find a local to guide me into the jungle.

There are no "similar tribes at cheaper cost".
And, despite numerous trips to the region I've never heard of "Tin Tin boats" either - the person writing that on TT may have misheard the word "ketinting", an Indonesian word for "canoe".
Anyway, if you've found those posts, you should know the rough route to get there.
Good luck with "locals guiding you" (especially if you don't speak Indonesian) - you'll need it!

Just to clarify, PNG=Papua New Guinea (ie the Eastern half of the island). The western half is Irian Jaya or West Papua.

OG, (West) Papua has not been called Irian Jaya for something like a decade now.

Interesting, since LP still links to that and not to Papua.

Time to turn off those links - I don't see any of them! ;-)

The site calls it Papua and so does the book - and more importantly, the Indonesian goverment.

I'm not sure how you'd do your onward travel, however to travel from Vietnam to Singapore the cheapest way would be to fly with Australia's budget airline, Jetstar - I've just done a quick search on a random date and it costs US$52 icl. taxes to fly from Saigon to Singapore.