The only modern equipment they had was a radio. Accompanied by five companions, Heyerdahl sailed it for 101 days over 4,300 miles across the Pacific Ocean before smashing into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7, 1947. Heyerdahl and a small team went to Peru, where they constructed a balsa-wood raft out of balsa logs and other native materials in an indigenous style, as recorded in illustrations by Spanish conquistadors. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to these people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so. Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have settled Polynesia in the South Pacific in Pre-Columbian times. Kon-Tiki is also the name of the popular book that Heyerdahl wrote about his adventures. It was named after the Inca sun god, Viracocha, for whom "Kon-Tiki" was said to be an old name. Kon-Tiki was the raft used by Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl in his 1947 expedition from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands.
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