We went to the famous Cu Chi tunnels today, which was quite an experience. You get to crawl through the same tunnels that the Viet Cong used during the American War, which results in one having a lot of respect for what these people endured.
While we could only navigate the tunnels painfully on our hands and knees, the Viet Cong guerillas ran upright with head bowed, while carrying a rifle. They cooked, ate, slept and lived in these tunnels, venturing out to the Mekong River to have a bath.
250 km of tunnels they built, a couple of which ran directly under the American base at Cu Chi. They would attack by night, then disappear without trace. When the tunnels were eventually discovered by the enemy, they were too small for the American frame, so the Americans sent in the smallest people they could find, but these people often fell victim to booby-traps and land-mines.
As a solution, the Americans started to use dogs to sniff out the entrances to the tunnels, but the guerillas also managed to thwart that approach by taking the uniforms from American corpses and rubbing them over the entrances to mark them with smells that the dogs would associate with friendliness. They also dropped chilli powder over the entire area to make the dogs’ nose swell.
Again, I have to say that the ability of these people to fashion solutions from anything that happens to be available — no matter how seemingly useless — leaves me thinking that we are very pampered in the West, often complaining and unable to cope when we are forced to forego our little luxuries, while the people here can devise much more intricate solutions to their problems than we can, even though they possess much less in a material sense. It seems that the raw materials to fix your problems are always there, just so long as you look hard enough.
Our tunnel guide was excellent, by the way. He was a former army officer and possessed a great deal of knowledge and experience about the war. He had seen all of the famous American films about the Vietnam War and pointed out inaccuracies in all of them. They are not to be trusted, in his opinion.
After the tunnels, we went to the American War Crimes Museum (or the War Remnants Museum as it seems to have been renamed). That made for about as grim an afternoon of exhibit viewing and placard reading as I can possibly imagine. I’ve done a fair amount of reading on the subject in the past, but nothing could really prepare one for the photographs and other exhibits on display here, with everything from snaps of GIs holding up the heads of beheaded North Vietnamese soldiers to preservation jars containing the pickled, mangled bodies of babies born with fatal birth defects, the victim offspring of parents who had ingested dioxin when Agent Orange defoliant had rained down on them from the spray-planes above.
Outside, a war victim with no arms below the elbows, a mangled leg and only one eye greeted me and shook my hand with his stump, before trying to ply me with counterfeit copies of novels whose plots take place in Vietnam.
After that, it was back to the hotel (a new hotel, since the last one was charging more than it was worth) for a short period of relaxation, before hitting the street again for dinner and then taking a cyclo elsewhere for ice-cream.
Tomorrow, we depart for three days to the Mekong Delta, which is — by all accounts — a great experience. When we return, we’ll spend one last night in Saigon and then depart for Hong Kong the next day.
I expect we’ll write more during our last evening here.