Cu Chi

Woohoo, bacon for breakfast! It was wrapped in little parcels, however, so it wasn't real bacon.

Another early start to catch the bus to Cu Chi where the Viet Cong had their headquarters in the underground tunnels around Saigon.

We turned up at the front desk promptly at 8am to catch the bus only to find that the receptionist had not actually booked the trip for us. A quick exchange of dong later and we were booked in and waiting for the bus to arrive.

Our fantastic tour guide, Han, had excellent English and filled us in on much that we had been questioning during the trip our of the city to Cu Chi.

To our delight, she agreed with our conclusions about Russians - the Vietnamese think they are rude, fat, arrogant and smelly. There was an enclave north of Saigon that they had set side for them, but someone started flying them from Moscow to Nha Trang, which is traditionally a Vietnamese holiday spot.

The Vietnamese are born to ride scooters. Their first scooter trip is as a three day old baby clutched to the chest of the mother as she rides home from the hospital. The top 3% of the population are the wealthiest and are the ones who own cars. It's very hard to break into that top 3% because there's a lot of corruption in government and you have to know the right people to get the well paid jobs.

As a tour guide, she pays $150 per month for renting a room in the city (no kitchen and a shared bathroom).That's half her salary. If you're single, you have just a coffee for breakfast and eat dinner from street vendors for about $3.

It's very hard to buy houses; mortgages are hard to get without security. Most people live with three generations in one house. Only younger people from outside the city rent rooms. To buy a house you need gold. They buy piles of $2,000 gold ingots from the banks to exchange the money.

The tour around the Cu Chi tunnels was fascinating. The ingenuity of the tunnelers to hide their presence from the US soldiers was amazing. As well as the hidden entrances above ground, they had numerous tunnels opening under water in the Mekong river that were used as entrances and a means of disposing of the soil dug out. In other places soil would be disposed of in the numerous bomb craters. Air breather tubes were made from bamboo and hidden in tree stumps. These you could hardly see. They made fake ones that were far more obvious and some were mined to kill the troops who examined them. In all the tunnels stretch from the Cambodian border to Saigon, total length is about 250 km. 

The tunnels themselves were tiny. They were dug out of the clay by hand using small hoes. None of them go in straight lines, they meander to offer protection from bombs and make invasion more difficult.  Only the kids went down them, we didn't fit. And these tunnels had been widened by 50% for the tourists. The photo of Jonah in the hidden exit gives you some idea of the size, but again this exit has been enlarged.  These hidden trap doors were about 25 cm x 15 cm.  They were deliberately small to prevent access by the broad shouldered Americans. The entrance tunnels were about 30 cm wide, quite often with smaller choke points where any invading soldiers could be ambushed.
There were also many different and vicious traps laid down both in the tunnels and above ground. These mostly consisted of barbed nails of various designs whose intent was to impale and maim, not to kill. The American troops would then attempt to help their stricken comrade and get ambushed by the VC. Interesting to note that there was nothing in the museum yesterday that mentioned these brutal inhumane traps.

There were generally three levels of tunnels. The top level was where most of the living was done, but these were the least safe. The tunnels had trap doors to the lower levels that could be closed to prevent chemical weapon attacks. They even had special bomb shelters with triangular roofs accessed from the lowest level.

It must have been a horrible place to eke out an existence, but that's exactly what 16,000 people did during the war. The fact is, there was no choice. You lived this way or you died.

Han was such a good guide that we booked her for our trip to the Mekong delta on Friday. The hotel apparently gets a 40% cut of the tour fee, which is a little excessive; booking direct costs us less and we get a much more interesting tour off the beaten track.

Went into the night markets for dinner. The night markets don't start setting up until 6.30 pm. It takes less than half an hour to set up a fully functioning kitchen complete with wood fired barbecues and a dining room with tablecloths and cutlery. We had far too much food to eat and surprisingly it was more expensive than the restaurant the previous night.

Off to see some more museums tomorrow - completing the walking tour we started yesterday. And I think there's even more shopping planned.