Whirlwind Trip of Oslo (29-Feb) - Part 2 - Beach, Kon/Tiki, Fram and Maritime Museum.

After arriving in Oslo we went straight to the hotel and crashed out.  The next morning I had a bit of fun trying to get my car out of the carpark.  First we had a ticket from the previous night so we knew that we needed to pay.  The gates were locked and we couldn't get in, so we walked around until we found a døråpner (which translated to door opener).  It had a place to insert our ticket but it was stuck and didn't take the ticket.  So we walked around the corner and found another one.  This time it accepted our ticket and  a bunch of Norwegian appeared on the screen that I couldn't read.  There was a place for a credit card so I inserted mine.  There was a buzzing every few minutes but I couldn't work out what it was.  Eventually we realised that the door wasnt going to open, so I headed into the office.  

It turned out that the machine was only there to open the door for regular visitors who had access cards. The buzzing was the owner opening the door for us.  He told us that we needed to pay on the way out, so we got the car and drove to the pay machine in the entrance. We tried to pay but it rejected our payment and said we needed to pay at the head office. So I walked back and had to wait until the manager buzzed the door to let me out.  When I told him we couldn't pay he gave me a really intense look and said "Have you been longer than 24hours." When I told him we'd been there 12 hours he stared at me and said "We have videos so you will get a fine if you have been longer."  I promised him we had been less than 12 hours, so he told me to go around the front and try the pay booths there.  When I got to the front, the doors there were locked too.  I had to wait until the manager saw me waiting and buzzed me in.  It finally accepted my payment.  "You have 5 minutes to get out," the manager said and then headed back to his office. 

I walked back around to the main entrance where Kris was waiting in the car, but of course the door between us was locked so I couldn't get in and the manager had wandered off.  I ended up calling out to Kris and passing her the key through the gate.  Finally we escaped!

Our first target was the Kon-Tiki museum, Fram museum and Maritime museum.  We drove there but couldn't find a park as the carpark was under renovation.  In the end we parked at the only carpark we could find free about a kilometer away:

Where we parked and where we walked

We stayed at the red circle, parked at the red triangle and walked to the red diamond.

Of course the first thing we encountered was ice and the kids went straight to ice-skating in their shoes:

Ice- skating

More ice-skating

Of course there were casualties, and after being warned multiple times there was not much sympathy:

The slide went wrong - no bruises

And another one bites the dust (or ice)

We had the choice to walk along the road or along the beach, so we chose the beach.  The bay looked pretty awesome:

The bay

Looking out over the bay

Looking out over the bay (panoramic)

The beach

Of course, in usual Puplett fashion it wasn't simply as easy as walking along the beach.  We ended up having to climb over shale:

Walking on the shale

...across the black sand and shale:

The black sand and rocks

... across more rocks:

Our path

  
... and then up through someones garden, over their hedges, back down to the beach, over more stones, up a small cliff and then over a gate for an estate.  

Eventually we made it back to the road and to our first set of museums.

There were three museums co-located - The Kon-Tiki, The Fram and the Maritime Museum.

Kon-Tiki Museum:
The first museum we went to was the Kon-Tiki museum.  This was a museum dedicated to the Kon-Tiki expedition.  In 1947 Thor Heyerdahl built a reed raft and sailed from South America to Polynesia to prove that it had been possible for primitive man to have sailed between the two and hence explain the similarities in culture and beliefs.

The first raft was the Kon-Tiki which was made from nine balsa trees, balsa logs and pine splashboards.  It sailed from Callao, Peru on April 28, 1947 and arrived at Raroia atoll in Tuamota where it was beached on a reef.

Thor then undertook several expeditions to the Easter Islands.  After this he built the rafts Ra and Ra II from papyrus and attempted to sail from Morocco across the Atlantic.  Ra cracked up due to a construction fault and the crew had to be rescued.  Thor then built Ra II and sailed to Barbados, proving that it was possible to cross the Atlantic in a papyrus boat.

The final boat was the Tigris, which was a reed boat to sail from Iraq to the red sea.  It was deliberately burned by Thor in protest to wars in the area that prevented their progress.

Easter Island statue outside the Kon-Tiki Museum

Statue outside the museum

Kon-Tiki Museum

Easter Island Statues in the Museum

The statue on the left is a 30ft cast made during the architectural expedition in 1956.  The right one is a replica of a model with a sailing vessel with three masts carved into its chest.

The Kon-Tiki Raft

Kon-Tiki

Relics from Easter Island expeditions

Ra II Raft

Ra II

Fram Museum
 The next museum was the Fram museum, dedicated to the "Fram" (Forward) ship that explored both the Arctic and the Antarctic in 1893 and 1912.  It sailed further south and north than any other wooden ship.  The museum was created by building around the ship:

The Fram Museum

Looking up at the Fram

The Deck

Inside the Fram

Kris and the kids up on the deck

There was also the Gjøa in a secondary building, this was the first vessel to traverse the Northwest Passage connecting the northern Atlantic and Pacific Ocean:

Gjøa

Maritime Museum:
Our final stop in this part of Oslo was the Maritime Museum.  This museum was undergoing renovations and the kids were a bit tired and ratty so we didn't spend very long here.

View from the top floor over the harbour

Figureheads