"I shall return"

Vital Alsar plans next year to return to the Pacific either on La Balsa , or another raft. He wants to drifi from Ecuador to French Polynesia and then back b> returning currents. He believes the Huancavilca Indians of Ecuador in pre-Hispanic times migrated to the Pacific this way, and to support this theory he told PIM in Sydney he wants to re-equip a voyage to Raroia in the Tuamotus (where Heyerdahl ended his Kon-Tiki drift in 1947), and back.

La Balsa, he says, is in excellent shape (see right), only the roping needs changing, and, although the balsa logs absorbed some 10 tons of water during the cross ing, the raft was only an inch deeper in the sea al the end.

The stores, supplemented by fish and supplies from the three ships stopped, had almost run out on arrival.

The crew got extra exercise with gymnastics and yoga and are hard and tanned after their voyage. Vital had bronchitis early on, but constipation was the only othei discomfort. Not so with the animals; of two cats and three birds, only Minet the cat, survived, and he was washed overboard five times and once almost carried away by an albatross.

All the raft men fell off at least once.

Vital learnt during his stay in Sydney that he had been awarded one of Spain’s highest naval honours, El Merito Naval.