Atleast papyrus is closer to reality than bamboo! ;-p
Hopefully Papyrus is closer because it would make things partially easier. You can simply carve a damn canoe out of a damn tree also. It shouldn't be that hard....
I had to Google up bamboo to find the Vietnamese & Thai making funky and neat boats out of them. One was a basket boat (bamboo boat <- Image search), with another being a slightly 'luxurious' take on them.
-> Tourist (Vietnamese) river boat:
http://www.dreamstime.com/roya…amboo-boats-image28009937
From what I can see you'll need bamboo, some wooden furniture, and some specific stone carvings for the roofing. Then again, there's variants so you can get away with basic bamboo everything. You'll simply need wooden furniture, and then anything more complex & fancy on the variations. Red51 could use this to experiment with storage chests & everything else moving to see if the game can handle moving storage chests. This could be the 'prototype' for everything onward for all the other vehicles and such. It can hold torches/lanterns, among other things. Simple, yet complex at the same time. It's meant to hold many entities also so that should be interesting to see for those long journeys on rivers and similar.
If we do get this, I'm expecting this after a simple wooden boat, canoe, and/or a Papyrus boat. Red51, you can blame Mojang for me constantly harping you about this. Blame Mojang for failing to give variety to their boats; Wurm Unlimited/Online knowing how to do boats.