Arctic Adventure Part 7 - Stockholm/Oslo wood and wicker boats

Without a doubt, Stockholm is one of the most beautiful cities in the world.  It's tucked in among a bunch of islands (the Stockholm Archipelago - go figure).

Which means that if you're arriving by ship it's quite a treat just getting there.

Nice place for those discriminating buyers with very deep pockets

Most of the houses you see winding your way around the islands are summer homes.  Red is the dominant house color. There's a reason for that.  I thought it was so they could find the place in wintertime if they had to. Nope. It's money.  Back in the day, red paint was the cheapest to make.

Like I mentioned, Stockholm is gorgeous. Possibly because Sweden was "neutral" during the war.  That meant that Stockholm didn't get reduced to rubble (courtesy of the German marauders, or the Allies evicting them) .

It rained on me so I had to steal this picture from the webBy en:User:Condor Patagónico - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Stockholm_Port.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3431778

The architecture is stunning.

Stockholm actually occupies 14 islands of the archipelago. Like everything else in Europe, Stockholm has been around a long time (yawn) and dates back to 6,000 BC (stone age).
One of the things it's known for are some outstanding universities.  Here we see some typical college students hard at work at an outdoor physics class:

I took this picture from the ship as we sailed by

The object of this "study group" was to knock over the beer can between the opposing lines.  Whenever it happened there was great cheering and the hard working student was awarded an "A" for his team (meaning the losing line had to chug a beer). Some college traditions are the same the world over....

Loved this fountain

It's called
"God father on the arch of heaven"

I would have named it
 "Naked surfer bangs head and sees stars"

As I mentioned, Stockholm covers a collection of islands.  This bascule bridge was cool - swinging steel meets solid rock.

Apparently the light signals are for guys only

See what I mean?

Stockholm has been voted one of the cleanest, best smelling cities in Europe. That's because it has virtually no heavy industry, and no nearby power plants.  The city is home to a huge service industry. 85% of the inhabitants work in the service industry. Service requires connectivity - Stockholm has one of the largest fiber-optic networks in the world (around 1,000,000 miles worth).  

This is also the home of the Nobel Prize. The big banquet is held here, at the City Hall:

Anybody see Bob Dylan yet?
By Arild Vågen - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16524364

Enough of the serious crap.  What about goofy stuff?

Apparently  they're prejudiced against the color blue
(I know, it means no parking)

No parking if you're colorblind?

Seriously. Do you really need a sign for something this obvious?

This isn't an optical illusion.  The smokestack really is bent.

In case you're wondering, Stockholm syndrome is named after the Norrmalmstorg robbery of Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg in Stockholm, Sweden. "During the crime, several bank employees were held hostage in a bank vault from August 23 to 28, 1973, while their captors negotiated with police. During this standoff, the victims became emotionally attached to their captors, rejected assistance from government officials at one point, and even defended their captors after they were freed from their six-day ordeal."

Numbskulls.
Leaving Stockholm, dodging the cool ferries

and avoiding the rocks

 the next port was Oslo, Norway. 

 Once again, arriving by ship the vista is stunning.

Oslo isn't real big (less than 2M people) and after you try eating in a restaurant you will understand why.  Holy crap is that place expensive!  Oslo is rated the second most expensive city in the world (after Tokyo). You need to take out a loan if you want more than one cup of coffee. As it happens, Norwegians have money. Lots of money. Back in the 60's the Norwegians went to sea looking for oil. They found the motherload. Their north sea oil fields are huge. Unlike, say Venezuela, the Norwegians have managed their oil wealth well. It's rumored each Norwegian is backed by $1,000,000 in the treasury. They haven't, however, sat back thinking the oil will last forever. Norway has invested heavily in wind power.

These aren't giant beer cans (dammit).  They're ocean platforms for wind turbines.

More screwy statues

This child slide struck me as extraordinarily safe.

What fun is a slide that if you ride your bike down you don't risk any broken bones? Jeez, it's like a swing you can't jump out of at apogee.

Cool, interactive art work

Wonder if they spew snow in the winter?

I was thrilled to visit Oslo as it's home to the Kon Tiki museum.

Took a ferry to get here.  Guess which one of the buildings houses the Kon Tiki and Ra.  Yeah I got it wrong too.

At first glance I thought it was a museum of oil filters (look at the name on the middle building above).

Walked into the wrong museum, but wasn't disappointed. The Fram Museum houses a ship that was used in expeditions of the Arctic and Antarctic regions by the Norwegian explorers Fridtjof Nansen, Otto Sverdrup, Oscar Wisting, and Roald Amundsen between 1893 and 1912. 

Frito-chip Nansen
By Book's author is Anne E. Keeling, photographer is unknown - Project Gutenberg eText 13103 From The Project Gutenberg eBook, Great Britain and Her Queen, by Anne E. Keeling, 2nd edition published by T. Wolmer, London 1897. Link to this image is here, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=849750

They got the idea to explore the arctic ice cap by analyzing driftwood found on one side of the cap that was from ships that had been wrecked on the other side. The idea was postulated that a current flowed under the ice cap (it does) and they could use this current to reach the north pole (you can't). 

Hoped for route
By Dtbohrer - Heavily modified version of File:Artide.svg. The line of the expected drift is drawn from Nansen's description contained in Nansen, Fridtjof: Farthest North Vol I pp. 21-24, Constable & Co., London 1897., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8048069

The trick was to build a ship strong enough and designed in such a way that instead of freezing into the ice (which will crunch you like an aluminium beer can at a frat party) would "float" up on the ice.

At sea

On ice
(note the windmill - used to generate electricity, not grind flour)

The Fram is very shallow draft and has almost no keel. 
If you're wondering about the weird colors - the museum (for some inexplicable reason) uses colored lights. I did my best to filter them out but I couldn't correct everything.

It's built from multiple layers of different types of wood and is the strongest wooden ship I've ever seen.

The propeller is 2-bladed and can be retracted into the hull for safe keeping

Spare propellers in case you get hosed and lose the first one

The idea actually worked.  Sort of.  Well, the ship didn't get crushed, but they didn't float up to the north pole. They spent 3 years stuck in the ice.  Fortunately, they planned for this in advance.  They were well armed and were able to supplement stores with whale blubber (yuk), polar bear meat, walrus meat (probably fishy tasting), and tacos. 

They also had entertainment.

As expected, the ship got stuck on the ice.

"look at the grouse" (famous 3 Stooges line)

Not to be deterred from reaching the north pole, a small group of idiots set out by dog sled to accomplish the goal. This didn't turn out well and they wound up being rescued by a British expedition trying to do the same thing.  They didn't return to Norway until 3 years later.  Ironically they returned home just days before the ship (having thawed out) also returned (THAT had to have been a party to remember).

Navigating way way up north in the old days wasn't easy.

They would have killed for this type of modern instrumentation (incidentally, this is a shot of the TV screen nav readout of the furthest north we were able to go before hitting pack ice - more about this later)

 When you get up way far north a compass does not work.  It just spins around erratically (much like my first instrument training flights). Instead they built very clever magnetic measuring doohickeys.

Coincidentally, later in the trip we anchored next to the modern Fram up in Spitsbergen.

Like it's namesake, the modern Fram is an arctic exploration ship.

Next door to the Fram is a "boat" I read about when I was 10 and never dreamed I'd see in person.

Kon Tiki - I'm guessing this picture was taken at the end of the voyage (note the land in the background and the depth of their tans)

The real McCoy has been lovingly preserved all these years (the voyage was in 1947 from South America to the Polynesian Islands). Kon Tiki is named after the Inca sun god. The expedition was the brain child of this guy:

Thor Heyerdahl 
By uncredited - nasa.gov, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1334029

 "Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so."

It 'em 101 days and they covered 4,300 miles from Peru to Tuamotu Island.

I thought the addition of the tern shadow was a nice touch.

It was hard to photograph because of the low lighting.  It costs 10 euros to get in - you'd think they could afford to pay for better lighting.

The raft was constructed of balsa logs lashed together with hemp rope. Soon after they put to sea, the balsa logs began to take on water (waterlogged). If they'd used steel cables to hold it together - the swelling of the logs would probably have broken apart the raft. It scared the hell out of them until they realized that the water only soaked into the balsa logs to a depth of 3 inches.

The US Army was interested in the trip (why?) and donated a bunch of food.

All 6 of them made it safely.  The only casualty was the ship's parrot. Apparently Lorita fell overboard and drowned. "Sparky", the ship's radioman (Knut Haugland), was an interesting person (WW 2 Norwegian commando) and the only one to star in a movie other than "Kon Tiki". He was decorated by the British for his role in the "Norwegian Heavy Water Sabotage" that stalled the German atomic bomb project. "Operation Gunnerside was later evaluated by SOE as the most successful act of sabotage in all of World War II"

Thor had so much fun on the Kon Tiki that he decided in 1969 and 1970 to see if you could sail from Morocco to Barbados.  These were the Ra expeditions (I and II).

 The Ra expeditions damn near killed them. The raft this time was made from Egyptian papyrus reeds.  

Same stupid lame lighting again

In the first voyage they made it 4,000 miles before the raft broke apart. They had neglected to add one critical component in the raft's construction.

You can see the critical piece here (this is the Ra II) - it's the line that holds up the stern.

In the Ra I expedition they built the stern the same way they built the bow.

You don't need the line in the bow - waves keep pushing the bow up.

For Ra II they changed boat builders.  This time the raft was built using papyrus from Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. Ra II successfully made it across the Atlantic using the Canary Current.

I thought this was the end of Thor and his voyages.  Not so. In 1978 he built another reed raft - the Tigris. This time he sailed from Iraq intending to go to Pakistan. Sailing through the middle east wasn't the best route he could have picked. The raft lasted 5 months and was still seaworthy when Thor got pissed that none of the surrounding governments would allow him to land.  He set the boat on fire (which explains quite well why the museum doesn't display it today).

"Today we burn our proud ship ... to protest against inhuman elements in the world of 1978 ... Now we are forced to stop at the entrance to the Red Sea. Surrounded by military airplanes and warships from the world's most civilized and developed nations, we have been denied permission by friendly governments, for reasons of security, to land anywhere, but in the tiny, and still neutral, Republic of Djibouti. Elsewhere around us, brothers and neighbors are engaged in homicide with means made available to them by those who lead humanity on our joint road into the third millennium."

Ah Thor.  Ya gotta love the guy.

• Although much of his work remains unaccepted within the scientific community, Heyerdahl increased public interest in ancient history and anthropology. He also showed that long-distance ocean voyages were possible with ancient designs. As such, he was a major practitioner of experimental archaeology.

Leaving Oslo things get real interesting - if you know where to look, but this blog entry has gone on long enough.