Friday, April 4, 2008

(no subject)

Hi I am starting back up the blog so if you have any questions email me . I am going to catch you back up with what has happened since Thailand. We visited Angkor Wat in Cambodia and it was HUGE. A lot of the rubble is around and some pillars and walls are injured but most of it is intact. There are a lot of cool pictures of their history carved into EVERY inch in the walls. Although it can start to get boring after looking at hundreds of them in 93 degrees. One of the most amazing things is
that the whole place is surrounded by a man made lake. Angkor Wat has changed religions in it's history from Buddhism to Hinduism. When it changed they placed red dots on it's forehead so they wouldn't have to destroy them all. Some they carved into flowers so when you look at them you can sometimes see small little Buddha's in the flower.

We also went to see large statue Buddha's in Bangkok Thailand. There were about 3 main Buddha's that we saw. There was the Jade Buddha, the Gold Buddha, and the Reclining Buddha. The Jade Buddha's legend is that it was hidden in cement and nobody new it was jade until lightning struck it on the nose revealing that it was jade. They call it the Emerald Buddha but it is jade. The Gold Buddha is bigger than me and is made out of Pure gold. It took us forever just to find it. The reclining Buddha
is the biggest of all. One of it's feet is twice as big as the door you come in to see it. It was fifty feet high and over 150 feet long! All of the Buddha's are made with molds. When we went to see the Gold Buddha there was a guy that took our pictures as we went in. When we came out he tried to sell us our pictures on buttons.
We visited Vietnam and saw Ho Chi Minh and he has been dead for 40 years. He was in a bed surrounded by a glass chamber. He didn't look that bad for a dead guy. To be honest I had to ask my mom if he wasn't made of wax. It turns out he wanted to be cremated. We also went to a museum and found out that they called it the American war, not the Vietnam War.
After all that we moved on to the Maldives. The Maldives are below India, if you look on the map you can see a little group of islands under India. Around the last surf day there I caught one of the best waves of my life. I caught the wave then stood up and teetered on the top. Then I flew down the wave so fast that it felt like it was shaking.

Right now we are sailing from the Maldives to Yemen. This is one of our longest crossings. We have been on it for about 11 days. Once we get to Yemen we will set off up the Red Sea and into the Mediterranean.

Tristan