VC Tunnels

This morning I joined a pair of older couples from Adelaide on a tour of the Cu Chi Viet Cong tunnels about an hour outside Saigon. Pretty amazing stuff. You'll see from the photos just how cramped these things were (they were enlarged from 30cm wide to 50cm wide for tourists) and you cannot really tell from the photos just how miserable it was inside. Its stuffy and absolutely unlit, pitch black. I crawled for about 175meters until I realized there was nothing to see crawling any further and got out but just to be in these places and appreciate the engineering and craftiness of these people makes you understand how impossible it would have been to combat them. The tour guide spoke with a tough accent which was difficult to understand and had trouble controlling the VOLUME OF HIS VOICE at times which made it even tougher to get what he was saying, but you could pick up the key facts.

In addition to walking (shuffling/crawling) through the tunnels you saw the complexity of their construction and a bunch of torture devices/booby traps on display. I also shot a few rounds with a M-30 Machine gun which was kind of cool and deafening. I am going to need to get a better historical perspective on the war now that I've visited here and gotten the Vietnamese take. My limited understanding makes it difficult to grasp their characterization of the norther troops 'liberating' the south. Further reading will be needed when I get back home I suppose.

Enjoy the pics, because they were not as enjoyable to be in as it looks from my smiles...


I should also mention that the timing of this trip has become more and more interesting given our election since I've been asked a number of times for my thoughts on what's going on back home and had varying opinions from people mostly depending on what country they're from. The Aussies today were for McCain overall but though Hillary was the better of the 2 democrats for her possible international relations and viewed Obama as being way too weak to handle difficult international conflicts. The Dutch I met in Hoi An were fully for Obama, however. Interesting times.