Day 10 – Norway 2017. On the tracks of great explorers

Today I was a brave and dedicated tourist. I was out of the hotel as soon as daylight made its modest appearance (about 9 am), only to find a cold and drizzly day. Ha, no stinkin’ rain was going to stop me, so I walked down to the bus station and took Bus 32 to the peninsula of Bygdøynes, where all the interesting museums are clustered (unfortunately the ferry that crosses the bay does not run during the winter months). By 9:30 am I was eagerly pacing between the Nautical Museum, the Kon-Tiki Museum, and the Fram Museum (winter hours are from 10 am to 4 pm). Man, that was a long half hour!

Finally 10 am chimed, and I was able to enter the single, vast room where the Fram emerges from a bluish mist as a ghost sailing out of the ice. You know, the Fram . . . yes, the famous ship in which Fridtjof Nansen drifted with the Arctic ice from 1893 to 1896, doing all sorts of interesting oceanographic observations (e.g., he noted that ice drifted to the right of the direction of the wind, a phenomenon we now know as the Ekman effect). A couple of years later, the explorer Otto Sverdrup took her out for another spin, to explore the islands of the Canadian Arctic. Finally, she was also used by Roald Amundsen in expedition to the South Pole from 1910 to 1912.

To think that I was able to caress her gunnels, walk through her decks, and stand on her quarterdeck! The Fram (“forward” in Norwegian) was the strongest wooden ship ever built, designed to stand the crushing pressure of ice flows. It had two unique design characteristics to accomplish this: internal buttresses to oppose the force of the ice, and a rounded cross section to help her to “pop up” on the ice, rather than let itself simply be squeezed.

On a separate nave of the same museum one can find another famous exploration vessel, the Gjøa, the ship that Roald Amundsen used from1903 to 1906 to navigate for the first time the northwestern passage from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific. By now you have noticed that Amundsen was a busy little bee when it came to polar exploration. He considered himself a polar explorer, and apparently was never happier than when he was freezing his buns. He was not just an attention seeker, however, but also a pretty dedicated ethnographer and polymath. In his voyage with the Gjøa, which he could have completed in one summer, he chose to remain in the Arctic for three years to study the Inuits, and to learn from them survival and voyaging craft in the Arctic, a knowledge that he later put to good use in his expedition to be the first man to reach the South Pole.

My next stop was to visit the Kon-Tiki balsa-wood raft and the reed vessel Ra. Both were projects by Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002). In 1946 Heyerdahl came up with the notion that Peruvian seafarers might have reached Micronesia by drifting along South Pacific gyre on their balsa-wood rafts (most archaeologists think exactly the opposite). To prove his point he and a buddy entered the Amazonian jungle of Ecuador, felled 9 enormous balsa trees, lashed them all together, and floated down to Guayaquil, and from there south along the coast of South America to El Callao (the port of Lima, Peru). That part alone would have earned him membership in the Explorer’s Hall of Fame, but he topped it by actually using the 9 enormous logs as the base of a raft, to which he added a bamboo cabin and a mangrove mast, and in 1947 proceeded to do the crazy trip from El Callao to Micronesia!

Heyerdahl re-invented himself as an archaeologist, and did some very interesting work in Easter Island. . . And then he got the crazy idea of sailing from Morocco to Barbados, across the Atlantic, in a reed vessel of the type the Egyptians used in the Nile. The first vessel, Ra, fell to pieces before they reached their destination (1969), but try-and-try-again, he built Ra II and made it to Barbados (1970). I am not sure what he was trying to prove, but in 1978 he built a third reed vessel, Tigris, to prove that trade might had taken place between India, Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea. Things get murky at this point, and according to Heyerdahl he put fire to the boat in Djibouti as a protest against the wars raging around the Red Sea (another version has pirates seizing the Tigris and burning it).

I could have quitted at this point, having quenched my thirst for famous voyages of exploration, but I still had the energy to visit the Nautical Museum, have a brod m. Rekkersalat for lunch (a delicious open face sandwich filled with the tastiest shrimp salad ever), visit the Viking ships museum (absolutely amazing reconstruction of two of the vessels), and take a quick look around the Folksmuseum. The latter is an open-air museum where in sunny days there are all sorts of displays and actors in folk costumes, but was not much to see in a drizzly afternoon.

Back in downtown I made my final visit, to the Nobel Peace Prize Museum, which had the ultimate effect of depressing me. Attaining peace is, alas, an elusive dream.

Well, that is it. I have had a great time in Norway, and am looking forward to finding an excuse to fly to Svalbard sometime in the next couple of years (Ceci, are you putting attention here?). I was delighted to spend time with Ceci, Greg, and Evan; they are a cute young family and I am glad to see that they are making new friends with incredible ease. Also, I will now have a good reason to dream about the stark beauty of the Arctic regions. Yeah!

Finis