2012 Vietnam - Cu Chi Tunnels, Ho Chi Minh City

We hired a car and a guide ($106 for 2 people) from the hotel travel agent. the whole visit took about 4.5h, from 1pm to 5.30 with a stop at a laquer workshop.


The drive takes us through a forested suburb of Saigon, with houses that have wide doors, more than half of the facade, which they keep open and live and play in front of them and inside. There were brown cows with down-turned horns and school children in white shirts and red Communist ties riding bycicles among rubber tree plantations, where the trees all lined up and tilted in the same direction.

The tunnels. The Vietnamese resisted the Americans by retreating in underground tunnels. The Americans were vicious, and apart from your normal bombs (!) they used chemical weapons. The tunnels went down three layers. First layer - bunkers, meeting rooms. This was 3m below ground. Next layer - kitchens and anti-bomb rooms, pyramid-shaped, for old people, women and children. Ventilation was ingenious, through bamboo sticks that went up to the surface from every level. Cooking was done at night and early mornings, and the smoke channelled out elsewhere, away from the kitchen. They wore black clothes and rubber sandals whole soles pointed backwards to confuse the enemy.

They had booby-traps, primitive but vicious. Pins made from exploded bomb shards, stuck to windows, rotating logs, all designed to trap and pierce the Americans, which cobra poison on the tips.

We went inside the tunnels. We had the option to go 20, 50 or 100m, and we came out after 20m. Lame. They were very low, even though they were enlarged especially for Western tourists, even I had to go on all fours. Yes, we had a picture taken. And another at the entrance to the tunnels, small square holes only big enough to fit a slim body (or a petite Vietnamese person), with a lid camouflaged with leaves, that you would lift with both hands above your head as you went in. My knees were sore very quickly after entering the tunnel, and the scenery of Jay's behind in a tunnel, however appealing, got repetitive after a while.