I’m still science traveling in Scandinavia, but here’s a few photos of something that’s a big deal here in Oslo – ships! This old sailing ship is used as a tourist boat when it’s not showing the contrast with the modern Opera House in the background. You can walk all over the roof of the latter, which goes all the way to the water and a cool glass sculpture floating in the fjord like a sailing ship in its own right.
But all the cool ships are on a separate spit of land best reached by a water taxi.
Which gets us to a series of small museums highlighting several Viking ships, the Kon Tiki, and the Fram. The Fram is an old (1890s) wooden ship taken into the Arctic, and later, the Antarctic. It’s a fascinating story I’ll have more on later. Here’s the Fram.
But my favorite was the Kon Tiki. Thor Heyerdahl sailed this balsa wood raft from Peru to Tahiti in 1947. I read about it many years ago. Even cooler, I was surprised to see that the museum also had the Ra, a papyrus boat he built in Egypt and sailed from Morocco to Barbados in 1969. I’ll definitely be writing more about these later as they are true science traveling.
[Note: This was from a trip in May 2015]
David J. Kent is an avid science traveler and the author of Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World (both Fall River Press). He has also written two e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate. His next book, Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, is scheduled for release in summer 2017.
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