The story of Thor Heyerdahl can be found in books, museums, and in movies.  He was born in Norway in 1914 and grew into an inquisitive and adventurous archeologist, geologist, ethnographer.  He is most known for proposing, testing, and potentially proving his theory of human migration from South America to Polynesia.  He surmised that Polynesia was actually populated from the east by Indigenous South Americans who drifted aboard balsawood rafts across the ocean.  He sought to prove his theory by building a balsawood raft, which he named Kon-Tiki, lashing it together with natural materials as it may have been, setting out to sea, and drifting to Polynesia.  However, in the spring of 1947, Kon-Tiki, Thor, and her crew put out to sea in search of ocean current that runs west from South America to Polynesia.  After 101 days alone at sea, Heyerdahl completed his so-called Kon-Tiki expedition, leaving the world in awe.  Kon-Tiki and her crew crashed into the eastern side of the Raroai Atoll in the Tuamotus in French Polynesia.  Thor met few scholars who supported this theory of Polynesian settlement stemming from South America then or even now.   However, his drift theory has been looked to by some as a testament to oceans as conduits for cultural transmission.

Set among a million shades of blue, a beautiful anchorage and a small monument to the Kon-Tiki expedition can be found on the inside of the Raroia Atoll in the Tuamotus.