Post by Grubb.
When I was a kid I remember my dad had a copy of “The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By raft across the South Seas.” He also had copies of “Omoo” and “Typee”, but they didn’t interest me because they didn’t have the dramatic photographs that Thor Heyerdahl put in his book describing his raft trip from Peru to Polynesia in 1947. For me, growing up in Chicago, Huckleberry Finn and Thor Heyerdahl were what adventure was all about. And after looking at what Oslo children imagined the future had in store for them, essentially a city under water, heading out to a museum dedicated to the ultimate raft trip seemed like a good segue. Plus, it was raining, so getting on a bus for a ride to the west side of town was a nice break from umbrella-jousting up streets that weren’t familiar.
The Kon-Tiki is in an A-frame building just like the Fram. It isn’t the raft I imagined as a kid. Back then, even with Heyerdahl’s slick action shots, it seemed smaller. Apparently my having read “Huckleberry Finn” first created a raft ideal that photos of the Kon-Tiki couldn’t budge. The raft in the Kon-Tiki Museum is 45 feet x 18 feet. To Thor it was a raft; to me it looked like a Polynesian cabin cruiser.
The museum has a loop of the 1950 documentary about the expedition that won an Academy Award in 1951. It also has a diorama with a killer whale shark, a walk-through replica of an Easter Island cave, and a room with Ra II, a boat built out of papyrus reeds that he sailed from West Africa to Barbados.
According to Thor, his sailing ventures were meant to test certain anthropological notions he had at the time, viz., that the Incas had made voyages to Polynesia. Although he showed it could have been done, most DNA evidence indicates that Polynesian ancestors came from Asia. So, like someone climbing to the top of Mount Everest in animal hides, he’s notable for proving that sailing 5,000 miles overseas in a balsa wood boat can be done. As any good Norwegian will tell you, it’s not about the theory, gud forby, it’s about the struggle to overcome the odds.
I also thought that Thor’s raft was much smaller, and I didn’t imagine a cabin.
Have you gone to the Viking ship museum? That might have been “the ultimate raft trip.”
Unfortunately, it’s closed until 2026.