Stamp of the Day and Book Review: Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl

I recently reread a most amazing book that I hadn't read for probably 30 years - Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft, by Thor Heyerdahl.

It was like seeing an old friend, and realizing that the old friend was even more interesting, nicer and fun than I remembered from before.  The book is a classic of course, and describes the rather crazy trip of 6 explorers on a small balsa raft from Peru to Polynesia and their 101 days at sea.  They proved that pre-historic people could have traveled such distances before modern navigation and metal tools.

Thor Heyerdahl's prose is great, he pulls you into the story and the diary, and there were only a few times I felt 'I want to know more! Give me details!'

Kon-Tiki is both an adventure story and an academic description of fieldwork, a great combination.  The thing I remember most from when I read this book as a teenager was the description of picking up the flying fish that had landed on board during the night, and making fried flying fish for breakfast each day. Somehow that image had etched itself into my memory.

Now I have more images, of whale sharks, crashing onto the reef around the final island, and the monotony of just sea, sky, and a tiny raft...

It is now 55 years since this trip was done, and it has been memorized on many postage stamps. Here are a few from Norway and French Polynesia:

Giant insects rescued at the brink of extinction, literally

Amazing story from other side of the Earth, where the largest stick insect ('vandrande pinne' in Swedish) has been rediscovered living on an isolated island under a bush.  Link here to article.
[Photo by Granitethighs from Wikimedia, Creative Commons license. Thanks for letting us use it!]

over 8 million species on Earth they say now...

And most of them have never been described, never given a name, yet...

Great story here, just out yesterday about the new census of Life.

When in Maine, this is the Main dish...

A lobster roll, a fantastic invention.  Cooked lobster meat stuffed into a bread roll (like hot dog roll, but split on the top, not the side), with some mayonnaise and some dusting of paprika.  Eat.  Simple. Good. Amazing.


We had our only lobster rolls at the Lobster Shack at Two Lights, near Cape Elizabeth south of Portland on a dead end road that ends in a parking lot that immediately becomes too full and too crowded on summer days.  But it is worth it.


 It is a little restaurant perched on the cliffs near the sea, and the closest building houses a fog horn (with appropriate signs to watch out for the sound, but how can you do that?  Doesn't it hit you when it hits you, without warning? Or does it sound a warning before, heh!?). The fog horn was on the day we were there, sounding its eerie warnings out in the fuzzy fog of the ocean.


There are other warnings too, near the shack itself, since it is surrounded with highly adapted ferocsiouly behaving seagulls that have mastered the feats of 'getting the lobster before the human'.  Hold on to your food, or someone else will.


The best thing with Maine are the rocks and the coastline.  Granite and shale cliffs, rounded by the ice ages' massively thick glacier covers, and now with lichens and seaweeds as the only plant cover.  The feel is very similar to parts of Norway (without the mountains) and the west coast of Sweden (Bohuslän).  I love it.


This yellow lichen (Xanthoria) are typical for these coasts, and if I ever would be a painter I would paint giant closeups of imagined lichen macro images. 


And out there in this direction, are Scandinavia and England.  Far away from Cape Elizabeth, Cape Cod, Nantucket and Cape May, but certainly, Europe is there. Even if it is invisible.  Don't you ever wonder how we can be convinced of such things before we have experienced them?  We have to believe the invisible until we have sailed, flown, or swum there.