THE CU CHI TUNNELS OF VIET NAM
iIt was one of the weirdest tourism experiences
we've ever had. As though Fellini and
Disney had teamed up to do 'Nam....
At the beginning of the tunnel complex, there's
a wall draped with clothing ... vests, cone
shaped peasant hats, capes in camouflage
colors. Oh yes, and rifles. Real rifles,
but thankfully without the ammo.
You can rent these things. And wear
them while crawling through the tunnels.
So much the better to feel like a guerilla.
The Cu Chi tunnels of
Vietnam are one of those horrible remnants
of a horrible war that
most folks would probably rather forget.
So, of course,
they've become a tourist attraction.
The Cu Chi Tunnels lie 75
km northwest of Saigon ... which nobody these
days but the
government and maps call Ho Chi Minh City.
At the height of
the Vietnam war, the tunnel system stretched
from the outskirts
of Saigon all the way to the Cambodian border
... something like
250 kilometers of tunnels.
The tunnel system, built over 25 years starting
in the 1940s, let the Viet Minh and, later,
the Viet Cong, control a huge rural area.
It was an underground city with living
areas, kitchens, storage, weapons factories,
field hospitals, command centers. In
places, it was several stories deep and housed
up to 10,000 people who virtually lived underground
for years.... getting married, giving birth,
going to school. They only came out at night
to furtively tend their crops.
The ground here is hard
clay, which made this whole thing possible.
But even so,
the planning and construction was incredible.
People dug
all this with hand tools, filling reed baskets
and dumping the
dirt into bomb craters. They installed
large vents so they
could hear approaching helicopters, smaller
vents for air and
baffled vents to dissipate cooking smoke.
There were also
hidden trap doors and gruesomely effective
bamboo-stake booby
traps.
Of course, the U.S.
military knew about the tunnels. The
tunnels not only
allowed guerilla communication, they allowed
surprise attacks,
even within the perimeters of U.S. military
bases. The U.S.
retaliated with bombs, eventually turning
the region into what
writers Tom Mangold and John Penycate called
"the most
bombed, shelled, gassed, defoliated and generally
devastated area
in the history of warfare."
That was then.
Today, the trees and bushes
have grown back. And since 1988, two
sections of tunnels
have been open for tourism. There are
what some guidebooks
call the "real" tunnels at Ben
Binh. They remain
unlit and mostly unreconstructed, which means
chunky Westerners
shouldn't even try.
Re-creation of underground conference room from which Tet offensive was planned
The "fake" tunnels at Ben Duoc
aren't fake at all. They're merely renovated,
widened for tourists and come complete with
lights and displays underground.
After declining the guerilla costumes and
gear we went for a hike through the woods
while our guide pointed out bomb craters
(labeled by shell type) and smoke vents,
thoughtfully steered us around booby traps
and let us play a brief game of "try
to find the trap door" ... which, of
course, we couldn't.
Finally, we came to the tunnels. We
dropped through a trap door to the first
level, 10 feet below the surface, and squeezed
through narrow passageways to see bunkers,
a hospital, a kitchen and the actual command
room from which the 1968 Tet offensive was
planned.
There are tables and chairs, bunk beds, crude
cooking stoves, dummies outfitted in guerilla
garb and, for effect, the occasional live
person to give an authentic touch.
Even with the tunnels widened it was a squeeze,
especially one serpentine stretch at the
second level where we had to drop to our
knees and crawl while the ceiling scraped
our spines. There was a third level, which
is hardly 18 inches high and definitely would
have required wriggling on our stomachs.
We gratefully declined.
The day we did all this, the temperature
was 98 degrees with correspondingly high
humidity, and the sweat gushed so heavily
we could hardly hold onto our cameras. It
gave us an incredible admiration for the
people who lived and struggled here.
After one last wriggle, we came up at a snack
stand where we got to taste the taro root
and green tea that tunnel residents ate.
Then off to the souvenir stand, zoo and shooting
range (where, if you knock down the target
with your AK47 or M16, you can win a gen-u-ine
guerilla scarf).....
War is hell, and, sometimes, the aftermath
is just plain weird.
* * * *
Test your knowledge with our Viet Nam pop
quiz!
* * * *
Evening in Hanoi......................
One evening at dusk in Hanoi, we climbed aboard cyclos ... the local version of bicycle rickshaws. Slowly, we threaded our way through the heart of the old city while its streets unfolded their odd specialization.
There was a street lined with nothing but stuffed animals, another with people carving tombstones, another with ribbons and red paper for funerals, another with shoes, still another with bolts of silk and more with straw hats, brassware and walls of whiskey.
A cyclo trip is sensory overload. There are
smells of pepper and
curry and fried things and occasionally rotting
things. There's
the babble of voices, shrieks of kids playing,
the sputtering of
mopeds and those horns ... shrill, insistent
and ear splitting.
You glide along while bicycles, scooters
and trucks weave within inches of you.
Out of nowhere, a woman on a bicycle swerved in towards us. Two girls rode on the back. They reached their hands out and yelled hello and our fingers brushed.
This is the way to travel here ... slow enough
to see things and at street level so you're
part of the scene rather than being insulated
and above it in an air conditioned bus..
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