The landscape is very much like Bangkok. The same architecture and the same kind of street food market. Bright and early in the morning folks had makeshift stoves and cooked right on the sidewalk, which was interesting because the sidewalk is shared by people, cars, vans, and scooters. Lots and lots of scooters.
Our guide said the population of the city is about ten million, and the number of scooters is at about seven million. There were scooters, scooters everywhere. It reminded me of seeing the Hells Angels Motorcycles Gangs back home where an army of them would ride into town. Their collective presence alone was intimating.
These bikes aren't the souped up motorcycles like theirs. These are a notch above a bicycle, kind of put-putting along. This picture was taken at a light last night, and didn't turn out that great, but I hope you can see what I mean.
On my way to the meeting point this morning, I stopped a few times to make sure I was headed in the right direction, and I was helped by almost everyone.
Our tour was an intimate one, with only seven of us. Some of the other groups were massive, but it's just too hard to get everything that is being said, especially when you find yourself at the back of the group.
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| Notre Dame Cathedral, out meeting point |
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| The Central Post Office, which is a beautiful pink building that looks like a museum inside that is across the street from the cathedral. |
The ride to the tunnels took about an hour and a half, because of the back roads that were rough and bumpy. The distance is about forty miles.
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| Typical looking building |
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| This is the farm house where the lady that's sitting is making rice paper. The other lady is our guide. |
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| Here I am making a mess of things. You can't see it, but to my left, the fire is being fueled by what looks like rice hulls - the golden colored outer skin/hull of the rice. |
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| This hog was HUGE and of all of us, humans and animals, she seemed the happiest. She was definitely the biggest hog out there because she enjoyed being hand-fed, and we all obliged, as had many others, it appeared. There was one right behind her, but he just didn't have that winning personality of this one. |
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| Another view |
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| Her close-up |
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| This is jack fruit. It is flat with a bumpy texture. |
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| This one is round. |
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| This is a pineapple that almost looks like it's growing on the ground. |
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| This is a rubber tree. It is cut at a slant, and the sap drains into the bowl on the right. The bowl on the left has rubber seeds. Car tires are made from this. |
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| The family pet - a python |
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| Chickens. My grandparents had farm animals and had the grey chickens that we used to call guinea hens. You don't see them much, but when I do, it always reminds me of a dress with that print that I wore out while I was pregnant three consecutive years! |
The heat was brutal. Actually, it wasn't the heat, but the humidity. It was fierce. We lost two folks at this point when a mother and son from Australia got dizzy and had to go back to Saigon.
Cu Chi is a jungle-looking area. Very green with lots of trees, overgrown bushes, shrubs, and tall grass. Where the tour begins there are underground huts that are used as meeting rooms to show a film of how the local people, the guerrillas, prepared for and dealt with the war in their backyard.
The tunnels were a kind of underground city where the people could go for protection from the bombing and gas attacks. They were places for them to eat, sleep, and make and store supplies. There was even a school and hospital. The tunnels were created like a spider web, in that they branched off, and didn't follow a straight line. There were also several levels, with all of them leading to the nearby Saigon River. The entrances of the tunnels were camouflaged and difficult to see/find. They were also tiny. The US soldiers wouldn't have been able to fit in them. Now that it is a tourist attraction, and has been since around 1997, they have widen and replicated some of the tunnels so that Westerners can fit.
I went down a tunnel with every intention of going the short distance, but it's too narrow for any of us to turn around, and when I found out it was no turing back, I bailed. Ditched. Call it whatever you want, but I was out of there. The ceiling was low, so you had to scoot way down, and almost crawl. To say it was claustrophobic doesn't begin to describe the feeling that the walls were closing in on you, and I was down there for a minute, or less. Not for the faint of heart.
There were camouflaged air holes created to allow fresh air in. There was a large, smokeless kitchen, where the smoke from the coking fires were rerouted a great distance from the tunnels. The meals were cooked very early in the morning, so when the smoke did appear, it was assumed it was fog that was prevalent in the early morning.
The ingenuity that went into to creating these tunnels and the vast assortment of booby traps that accompanied them, was incredible.
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| Booby trap |
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| Bobby trap 2 |
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| Guide entering tunnel |
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| Now you can see how small the entrances were. They were wider once you entered, but you had to get through these small holes first. |
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| The spikes coming up out of the ground are made of sharpened bamboo. |
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| An air hole |
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| This is a US tank that was booby trapped and disabled in 1970. |
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| This is the inscription on the tank. |
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| I'm standing between these dressed up mannequins. |
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| A map of the region and the tools used to dig the tunnels. The miles of miles of tunnels represent more than twenty years of work. |
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| A model of the tunnels |
The five of us left on the tour were all Americans. You couldn't help but feel horrible for the human lives lost in this senseless conflict. And quite frankly, it was also hard not feeling guilty by association for the part we played in this craziness.
I thought of both my brothers, Willie and Terry, who spent time here during the war. Willie was here in the heat of things and Terry, as the conflict was coming to an end.
I'm reminded of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC. When you allow yourself to grasp that each name represents a person who went to war, but didn't come home alive, it's overwhelming. And of course, that's not counting the folks who went there whole, but what they saw, and what they did to survive, left them broken men, empty shells of their former selves.
As we drove through the area, I kept thinking, "These are simple people. Minding their own business." I'm sure this was even more so forty years ago. To go from farming your land and taking care of your family, to dodging bullets and bombs, must have been terrifying.
Speaking of bullets, private citizens are not allowed to own or have guns in this country. (That's a thought to consider America). There is a firing range at this site where locals and tourist can shoot. As we were touring, it sounded like the war was still going on. It was insanely loud.
Below is a five minute video of the area that some guys uploaded. They did a good job with the story telling but the video quality is not the best. Stick with it though because at the end you will see them on the firing range and you'll be able to hear the incredible sound the firing guns make.
This is the link to the video, just in case there are technical issues:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azxnc1nDkos
Tomorrow I'm headed to the Mekong Delta.
I know this was crazy long, and for that I apologize, but I just had to share this experience with someone.
As always, thanks for taking this ride with me.
