Cu Chi Tunnels

After our early start we drove about 70 kilometres to the area of Cu Chi. This is north west of Saigon. The people of this area, despite being in the south, were supporters of the communists in the north. During the fighting with the French some tunnels had been built in this area and were used to great advantage to conduct guerilla warfare. When the Americans came the tunnels were increased and to begin with no one even knew they were there. 16000 people lived down there during the war and proved a real thorn in the flesh to the Americans. We had a really interesting visit, starting with a propaganda film from the 1960's. We then saw how well hidden the entrances were and saw some of the weapons made, usually recycling ammunition captured from the Americans. The Viet Cong also set some horrific man traps and had every trick in the book for catching out their enemies. Dogs were used to scent out the Viet Cong but they started using American soap to fool the dogs and wearing uniforms captured from soldiers.


This picture shows one of our group trying out an original tunnel entrance. Not too many of us were small enough to fit through it, but the Vietnamese had thoughtfully widened a 50 metre length for the benefit of western visitors like us and we all duly crawled through. However there was an opportunity to come out about halfway along and several of us were very glad of it. We could not imagine living that way for literally months on end, only coming out at night to fight.

Some of the group also bought ammunition and had the opportunity to fire weapons on the range run by the Vietnamese Army. Our snack on this trip was to try tapioca along with some tea made from a local leaf. The tapioca wasn't too bad. It was a slice which we dipped in ground up peanuts - much better than the school dinner variety.

We were glad to see that this is now a peaceful area, very attractive countryside and mostly vegetable growing and rubber plantations. Our guide was a small boy living in Hanoi after the war and Thuy remembers that he only had one set of clothes a year, with new ones for the Tet holiday. There were also food shortages and rationing. He often had to get up at 1 a.m. to start queuing for food or his family might miss the chance that day.

This was our last trip on the bus and we were very appreciative to have had such a good driver who kept such a clean tidy bus and got us here in one piece. We heard the news about the boat sinking at Halong Bay and were glad this happened after we had been there as otherwise we would have been sleeping on deck or going by canoe!Darwin has had a cyclone since we left and record rainfall for the month so we were pretty lucky with our time there.