Saigon and the Cu Chi Tunnels


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Asia » Vietnam » Southeast » Ho Chi Minh City » Cu Chi
July 18th 2011
Published: July 20th 2011
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Fanny Ice CreamFanny Ice CreamFanny Ice Cream

It's not sushi
Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) is a huge metropolis of constantly flowing and honking motorbikes, tall buildings and vendors. People do everything on the sidewalk here. You see people cooking, eating, washing dishes, fixing motorbikes, cutting hair, sleeping. Even though the city was renamed Ho Chi Minh City after the war and there’s a huge statue of Ho Chi Minh in the center, everyone still calls the city Saigon. Must do's in Saigon include Fanny Ice Cream, the Ben Thanh Market and one of the many roof top bars. If you have a stomach for war images, I hear the War Museum has plenty.

Saigon is the largest city in Vietnam but it’s not the capital and in the past it wasn’t part of Vietnam. The population grew dramatically during the war because the city was a safer place to be than the countryside. The US military used Saigon as their base in the south to fight the guerillas in the north. The problem was that 40% of the southern Vietnamese were in support of the north. These people were mostly uneducated farmers and other supporters of communism. They became known as the Vietcong, which means dumb Viet’s, but of course that's not what they called themselves. Viet is the name of the largest ethnic group in Vietnam. The Vietcong were indistinguishable from other Vietnamese so the Americans didn’t know who they were. The Vietcong used the jungle to hide and create booby traps for the Americans. They also worked for the Americans in the city by day and fought them at night. When the jungle was bombed incessantly by b52’s and sprayed with agent orange to clear the vegetation, the Vietcong moved underground. They dug an intricate system of tunnels that stretched over 200 kilometers and contained kitchens, weapon storage and traps for intruders. They are called the Cu Chi Tunnels.

One of the things that was most impressive about the Vietcong was their resilience and resourcefulness. They used the scraps of old bombs and any tools, containers or pieces of metal the Americans left in their camps to create new weapons, traps and tools. Our guide, a South Vietnamese veteran himself, told us a story about approaching a box of ammunition in the middle of the jungle with a group of American soldiers. One of the soldiers decided to shoot the box to see what was inside. It turned out the Vietcong were using the US ammunition boxes as toilets in the Cu Chi Tunnels then leaving them in the jungle once they were full. The traps that the Vietcong set were gruesome. Lots of spikes with arrows on the end. As an American it made sense to me that they did what they did. They had to in order to survive.





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In the Cu Chi TunnelsIn the Cu Chi Tunnels
In the Cu Chi Tunnels

In some places there's a light but mostly its dark and hot and small


21st July 2011

SO much fun!
Tere, thanks for sharing your travels...I'm loving it!

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