When selling bootleg books didn’t work, the boy turned to begging for food. He looked 12 and was still perfecting his pity pitch.

After four days in Siem Reap (and another week in Sihanoukville), I got used to saying no to child sellers and beggars. I read enough articles to know giving them money does more harm than good:

A benefit of traveling off the beaten track is that when you finally visit a well-trodden place, it’s a pleasant surprise.

The annoyances of tourism – hustlers, touts, tons of restaurants and bars catering for tourists, loud drunken backpakcers – become a cultural attraction, no longer a burden.

To add a little challenge to my trip I did the following:

1. I stuck to off-the-beaten-path locales
2. I stopped using a guidebook
3. I started arriving at strange cities at late hours and without a clue

Result: it was still laughably easy.

Cairns isn’t just for the Great Barrier Reef. Just two hours north is a rainforest with deadly crocodiles, virginal beaches, refreshing creeks and at least one bat.

For one month now I have not used a travel guidebook once. I didn’t used one in Papua New Guinea nor in Java. I have no intention of using one from now on.

Doing away with guidebooks is like leaving the backpacker ghetto of a city and plunging yourself into its alien reality. It’s cutting off any safety lines to comfort and convenience.

It is, I daresay, real travel.

In one of the least-traveled islands of Papua New Guinea, you can find virginal beaches, expert-grade diving and surfing, back-flip into an emerald river, and feed a class of friendly eels.

Budget travel in Papua New Guinea was, as far as we could tell, not an option. The PNG Tourism Promotion Authority changed all that.

We had cone to PNG on a whim, eager to see a nation unspoiled by mass tourism. But we didn’t have a clue where to start. Most travel literature focuses on high-end tours and resorts, catering to those willing to pay top dollar for great diving, surfing, and trekking.

Wherever we went in PNG, we were the only backpackers there and the first ones that locals ever saw. And for a good reason. There is no infrastructure to accommodate budget travelers.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. You can stay several weeks in the country without spending a lot of money. You just have to work a little harder for it.

We added PNG to our travel itinerary on a whim. After meeting two charming ladies in Fiji, and reading the few scraps of travel info on the country, we had to see it for ourselves.

PNG is known for its incredible diving, surfing, and tribal diversity. But that’s not what attracted us.

The flight from Cairns to Port Moresby threw us off guard. The 37-seat Dash 8 turboprop smelled like the third world, a blend of accumulated body odour with a whisper of chemical toilet.

But we were surprised when they handed us our headphones for the in-flight movie: a huge wireless, noise-cancelling Sennheiser beast. The sound quality was excellent and it muffled most of the propeller drone.