The balsa-wood raft that Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl sailed from Peru to Polynesia in 1947 is the reason the Kon-Tiki Museum (Kon-Tiki Museet) exists. Built on a pre-Columbian model, the Kon-Tiki sits above a model of the whale shark its crew met on the voyage.
Alongside it is the Ra II, a reed vessel built to Heyerdahl's idea of an ancient Egyptian seagoing boat. He sailed it from North Africa to the Caribbean after an earlier attempt in the reed boat Ra failed. Maps from the Kon-Tiki expedition and a library of about 8,000 books complete the collection.
The museum opened in a provisional building in 1949. Its current building, designed by F. S. Platou and Otto Torgersen, opened in 1957, and Torgersen designed an extension added in 1978. Since 1986 the museum has periodically returned items Heyerdahl collected to Easter Island. It stands on the Bygdøy peninsula near the Fram Museum, the Viking Ship Museum and the Norwegian Maritime Museum.
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