Our Rick Steves' European Tour – June 2019
Oslo Ship Museums
The morning of our second day in Oslo, our tour group took a ferry to a complex of ship museums. The first was the Viking Ship Museum. Two large Viking-era ships are displayed there, along with artifacts from the 9th and 10th centuries. Both of these ships were first used as sailing vessels and then as burial vessels for important and wealthy Vikings. Gifts and possessions (some taken from raids in other countries) were buried with them, and these are on display as well. The ships and their contents were excavated from burial mounds and have been well preserved.
Next, we visited the Fram Museum. The wooden icebreaker, Fram, is said by some to be the strongest wooden ship ever built. It's rounded hull was designed to be stuck in ice without being crushed. Between 1893 and 1912, two great Norwegian explorers, Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen, broke all previous north and south pole records. Amundsen beat Englishman Scott to the South Pole and made it home alive! The museum is filled with informative exhibits about polar expeditions and adventurous explorers. Visitors can walk on the enormous deck of the 128-ft ship!
The Kon-Tiki Museum houses two ships used by Thor Heyerdahl to test his theories about early peoples who he believed migrated across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. In 1947, he and five crew constructed a raft out of balsa wood, using only pre-modern tools and techniques. They adorned the sail with a giant image of the sun god, Kon-Tiki. Heyerdahl and his crew set sail on the Kon-Tiki from Peru, surviving on fish, coconuts, and sweet potatoes. They traveled about 4300 miles and made it to Polynesia in 101 days.
In 1970, Heyerdahl's Ra II made a 3000 mile journey from Morocco to Barbados – on a vessel made of reeds – to prove that Africans could have populated the Americas.
The expression to the right really caught Gary's attention!
