Simon & Rosie's Travel Journal: Cu Chi Tunnels

Yesterday we took a trip to see the Cu Chi Tunnels - this is an area approximately 60km from Saigon which, during the war, was occupied by a pro-North Vietnam population (ie. the VC/Viet Cong or Vietnamese Communists), who launched a guerrilla war on the south (and the US Army) from their formerly sleepy rural idyll - an area quickly identified by both sides as vital in linking the North to the South and a launch pad to invade Saigon.

To escape the barrage of bombs dropped on the area by the US, they dug a staggering network of tunnels and underground shelters, complete with workshops, hospitals and sleeping quarters. The tunnels were tiny (like, really tiny), and stretched for miles and miles and allowed the guerrillas to launch surprise attacks on the enemy and escape when necessary. All that remains now are a few sections of tunnel here and there, with one having been dug wider to accommodate the tourists - and this was the one into which we crawled. The tour guide said it was large enough that we would simply need to bend over and 'walk through' the 100m section, which had been helpfully lit with electric lights. I was therefore ill prepared when we sunk down an narrow stair case, and down again - taking us to something like 3 metres below the ground - to face a very very tiny, and very very dark tunnel, lit by just a few dim red light bulbs. The air was thin and oven hot, heavy with moisture which dripped from the walls, and with my knees tucked up under my chest and my head scraping the ceiling of the tunnel, we scrambled into the unknown.

At times I had to lay down and crawl on my hands and knees and at one stage the walls moved even closer inwards, squeezing down to a point where I had to turn sideways to get my shoulders through. Where a few light bulbs had blown, we were sometimes in near total darkness, trapped between our own shadows.

And onwards we crawled, trying to calculate in our heads when our 100 metres would be up, when daylight would start to creep in. It curved and turned sharply, dropped down and rose again, the walls stretching out into the seemingly endless darkness. Claustrophobia was starting to tap on my shoulder and squeeze my lungs just as I saw the lower part of a girl's legs, upright and standing in front of me, her head up and out of the hole. A tiny slither of sunlight trickled down to my eyes and after another few steep staircases cut into the dirt, we were at ground level again, completely soaked in sweat and plastered with fine jungle dirt and soil, elated that we had survived the ordeal (and escaped from the pesky Yanks). Twenty four of us went in to that tunnel and, to our surprise, just five or six came out, Rosie and I included - the rest, it turned out, had given up and ducked out through the exit tunnel just seven metres in! We decided not to try out the section of tunnel that hadn't been widened - it being almost half the size of the one we'd just completed.

During the rest of the tour, we saw delights such as a terrifying array of booby traps being demonstrated with a wooden stick - 'this is the GI's leg' the guide said as he sunk it into a hole camouflaged with leaves and branches. With a snap and a scrape he pulled it out, the stick now pronged and pierced with four large rusty barbed nails attached to a large steel frame. 'GI gets to take this to hospital stuck to his leg and keep as a souvenir,' he says. 'Now we go to shooting range'. Here, several members of our group fired AK47's and M1 rifles at targets for prizes while we browsed the nearby gift shop with our fingers in our ears. Wandering further through the jungle, we came across a mangled US tank, hunched in the same spot where it was destroyed by a home-made anti tank mine fashioned from one of the many unexploded bombs dropped on the rice fields by the American B52s. A very interesting and harrowing day, and a must for anyone visiting Saigon...sorry, Ho Chi Minh City.