Kon-Tiki Museum

Brief information

The museum’s main exhibit is not a model or a reconstruction, but the Kon-Tiki raft itself, on which Thor Heyerdahl crossed the Pacific Ocean in 1947. Because of this, the museum reads not as a general story about travel, but as a house built around a specific object that returned from an expedition.

After the raft returned to Norway, it was decided to build a new home for it on the Bygdøy peninsula; the museum opened on May 15, 1950. This story changes the way you look at the exhibition: the central object here was first a participant in a voyage, and only later became a museum exhibit. The other vessels and objects help show that the museum presents not just one successful adventure, but different ways in which Heyerdahl tested ideas through real routes and things.

What to notice first

It makes sense to compare three types of exhibits. The Kon-Tiki raft shows the museum’s starting point: a simple vessel became the main proof of an ocean crossing. Next to it, vessels and objects from the Fatu Hiva and Ra II expeditions and the journey to Easter Island broaden the scale: what matters here is not only the routes, but also the material traces of each attempt.

It is also worth noting how the museum builds an environment around the vessels. The 30-meter cave exhibition is modeled on the caves of Easter Island, so it connects the expedition objects with a specific landscape. The underwater part of the exhibition shows a scene from the Kon-Tiki voyage: various fish, including a whale shark, darted beneath the raft. In this way, the museum invites visitors to look not only at the upper part of the raft, but also at the imagined space beneath it, where an ordinary exhibit becomes a vessel in the ocean once again.