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Published: February 11th 2005
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11 february 2005
i made a day of the co chi tunnels. dung, my cousin arranged for a motorbike driver to take me on an hour-long drive to the tunnels. i had no idea what was ahead. not just the thousands of motorbikes that RULE the roads (cars + trucks don't have a chance), but the underground tunnels that took 25 years for the VC to dig!
first my driver, thanh, was a tiny vietnamese 32 yr old man who was shorter than me (i'm 5'2"). he was teaching me how to speak vietnamese as best as he could, always busting out in a little laugh when i completely mispronounced such simple words like thank you and please. i was pretty good with identifying the animals on the side of the road though. it was a little tough to hear him or to be heard as we both had to wear protective covering over our nose + mouth when driving on the roads + highways. that's pollution control. it worked for me...along with the somewhat fitted helmet. (see picture of motorbikes from entry below)
so we arrived at the co chi tunnel entrance. a tourist attraction with a lot of vietnamese families visiting during their weeklong new year's vacation. a hot (almost too hot) sunny day...great day for a motorbike ride...although my butt is a little soar from the trip. or maybe it's my low back that scraped up against the tiny tunnels that we managed to crawl through. my highlights were crawling through what some might say are claustrophobic underground tunnels...but for me it was a challenge to keep my wits about me as i followed the guide through waist high tunnels (yes my waist, i stand at 5'2") accompanied by 4 inch bats flapping their wings past my hair or shoulders. okay...i did let out a holler. but regained composure and started to breathe and not freak out. we did two "crawl-through's." one was 60 meters through the first level (3 meters underground) and the second we almost talked ourselves out of it was 120 meters and 6 meters underground. the air got thick and that tunnel was the one most frequented by the bats. we still stopped to take pictures though. 3 kiwis (new zealanders), my driver, the guide + me. it was definitely a rush when we pulled ourselves out of the hole back above ground. we were all panting and sweating and our hearts were beating quite quickly despite my tunnel suggestions to just relax and keep breathing. we made it out thrilled! i can't imagine what it must have been like in the pitch dark fighting for survival. a different kind of rush.
a funny part of the story is that the guide didn't tell us it was his first time going to the 2nd level down until we got out of there. we ended in a kitchen sitting around a table sharing some kind of yam dipped in a mixture of salt, sugar, + peanuts. washing it down with some tea (i passed on the tea). pictures followed of our mission accomplished and then we set off to see the caged monkeys and pythons. a freshly squeezed sugarcane drink topped off the day and we left for home.
stopped in a marketplace to buy a roadside hoagie with pork sausage, some tropical red prickly fruit for the altar, green herbal chinese rub for aches + pains, and flowers for cuc (dung's wife) for her home + a happy new year present.
finished the evening at a nearby vietnamese restaurant where my cousin dung sent me with a handwritten note of what i would order, as he knew the menu would not be in english at all. a friend of a friend of mine in bali, carl is also traveling on his own through vietnam on his way to thailand. he studied advanced teacher training with shiva in wales and is just left his position as a yoga teacher in bali. we met up for dinner and decided to take a 3 day boat trip to the mekong delta. going with the flow.
(p.s. for those of you wondering - ooh, carl? no. he's just a friend of a friend accompanying me on a flow. he left his corporate computer engineer job after being enlightened a year ago at burning man....it did help that he met a cute yoga teacher there that introduced him to his first yoga class.)
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NYT article to further explain my cu chi experience today: http://www.mishalov.com/Vietnam_Cu-Chi.html
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