This is possibly the coolest thing a person could do - build a primitive raft and sail it across the Pacific Ocean to prove your theory that primitive peoples could have done the same thing. There's more than enough risk involved, but with a dash of technology you can try to let people know where your are along your way. Other than that you're pretty much on your own in uncharted territory. It may not be the case but I feel like Heyerdahl and his crew were some of the last great explorers (bound to this earth, anyway) and what they accomplished is incredible to me. As much as I loved reading about their journey, however, I think my favorite part was the last chapter when they finally reached land and the people whose forebears they were trying to emulate. It was tender. Kon-Tiki has sailed its way onto my favorites list.

Some of my favorite passages:

The civilized world seemed incomprehensibly remote and unreal. We had lived on the island for nearly a year, the only white people there; we had of our will forsaken the good things of civilization along with its evils. We lived in a hut we had built for ourselves, on piles under the palms down by the shore, and ate what tropical woods and the Pacific had to offer us. pgs. 15-16 (When he came up with the idea of the expedition, while living on the island of Fatu Hiva)

The weeks passed. We saw no sign either of a ship or of drifting remains to show that there were other people in the world. The whole sea was ours, and, with all the gates of the horizon open, real peace and freedom were wafted down from the firmament itself. It was as though the fresh salt tang in the air, and all the blue purity that surrounded us, had washed and cleansed both body and soul. To us on the raft the great problems of civilized man appeared false and illusory - like perverted products of the human mind. Only the elements mattered. And the elements seemed to ignore the little raft. Or perhaps they accepted it as a natural object, which did not break the harmony of the sea but adapted itself to current and sea like bird and fish. Instead of being a fearsome enemy, flinging itself at us, the elements had become a reliable friend which steadily and surely helped us onward. While wind and waves pushed and propelled, the ocean current lay under us and pulled, straight toward our goal. pg. 127

Sometimes, too, we went out in the rubber boat to look at ourselves by night. Coal-black seas towered up on all sides, and a glittering myriad of tropical stars drew a faint reflection from plankton in the water. The world was simple - stars in the darkness. Whether it was 1947 BC or AD suddenly became of no significance. We lived, and that we felt with alert intensity. We realized that life had been full for men before the technical age also - in fact, fuller and richer in many ways than the life of modern man. Time and evolution somehow ceased to exist; all that was real and that mattered were the same today as they had always been and would always be. We were swallowed up in the absolute common measure of history - endless unbroken darkness under a swarm of stars. pg. 173