Corey Buhay spent years dreaming about the jungle before she actually camped in one. After a first taste of Panama, she finally went deep into West New Britain, Papua New Guinea — a place with no marked trails, no campsites, bioluminescent mushrooms sprouting under strangler figs, and birdsong loud enough to drown out conversation. Her conclusion: it's doable, even for first-timers, if you plan properly.
Her timing mattered as much as her gear. She travelled during PNG's dry season, which runs May to October, meaning cooler air, lighter rain and far fewer insects. Go in the wet months and you're wading flooded trails and swatting sweat bees. Most of the world's great jungles have a similar wet/dry split, so picking your window is the single easiest way to avoid a miserable trip.
On shelters: forget the ground. With scorpions, tropical storms and zero flat, established spots to pitch up, she ditched her usual freestanding tent for a mosquito-proof Hennessy Jungle Explorer Zip XL hammock — and was won over. A built-in sleeve holds a sleeping pad steady, and "snakeskin" sleeves let you pack the whole rig away without it ever touching muddy ground.
Her other hard-won tips: treat your clothes with permethrin rather than relying only on DEET, which can dissolve the laminate in rain shells. Cover up — long sleeves, long pants tucked into socks — because jungle plants defend themselves with thorns and toxins. Carry backup water treatment: her squeeze filter handled bacteria and protozoa but not viruses, so she now pairs it with Aquamira drops or Katadyn Micropur tablets instead of lugging a $400 expedition purifier. Bring a GPS messenger with SOS (she used a Garmin inReach Mini 3) since paper maps are nearly useless under canopy that blots out the sky. And pack quick-dry, high-cuffed boots with deep lugs — not waterproof ones, which just trap moisture and invite fungal trouble.
The bigger argument in the piece is urgency. Tropical rainforests are disappearing at roughly 10,000 acres a day, and Buhay's blunt take is that there will never be a better year to go than this one. She also makes a case for swallowing your pride and hiring local help: PNG is a complicated country to visit, but locally owned lodges like Walindi Plantation Resort and Liamo Reef Resort in West New Britain give newcomers a safe base, and similar outfits exist across Borneo, Central America and the Amazon.
Why should a holidaymaker care? Because jungle camping sounds like an expedition-only fantasy, and it isn't. With the right season, a hammock, treated clothing, decent water treatment and a local lodge as a launchpad, an ordinary capable traveller can pull it off — the way Buhay did, three decades after checking rainforest books out of the library.
Reporting by Backpacker.