Asia Tour Leg 5, day 11

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I was up at 8.00am this morning with a severe hangover before getting the tour bus to the CU CHI Tunnels. These are a complex of underground tunnels that some of the Vietnamese people retreated to during the war. They fought from underground using various deadly booby traps, sniper holes and other tactics with the limited resource they had.

There was a short walk into the jungle first of all before reaching the complex. The Tunnels go to 10 meters deep, it gets really hot under the ground and is totally pitch black. I learned quite a lot about the war here and it’s odd to think that it only happened around 30 - 40 years ago. The tour guide was a real raconteur and kept everyone entertained. Some of the tunnels can’t be entered anymore as they have given home to snakes (cobra’s I think) and scorpions. At the end of the tour I had the option to have a go at firing a gun (something I’ve always wanted to do) so I bought some bullets and had a go on an AK47 (Kalashnikov), the noise made it feel like I was going to burst my eardrums,

At the end of the tour we were dropped off at the war museum. This was quite a humbling experience as it had some very graphic pictures and descriptions of the war victims. It also described the effects of the US Chemical attacks and the damage it caused even up to this day. I shared a taxi back with a French lass who was quite savvy with the taxi driver and now I’m about to go out again. I can start to relax a bit now as that’s pretty much it for early morning starts and tours and the beach part of the holiday is only a couple of days away!

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Photos

A trap
If you walk on to this you fall into the middle and slide through to the bottom