Travel Guidelines Blog

The reality of war begins when you take the plunge into the subways – Cu Chi tunnels in Vietnam

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam – The sound of gunfire pierced the air thick jungle. I’m on my hands and knees, crawling in the dark earth, sweating in places I did not know I had sweat glands.

“Keep it coming! Keep it coming! Vietnam calls for a uniform wire, to advance.

An employee of Cu Chi tunnel shows how villagers and Viet Cong tunnels into hiding during the war. The openings were incredibly small and hidden by leaves. When tourists visit the tunnels today, go through the segments have been expanded to accommodate the bodies of the West.

If you go

Cu Chi Tunnels: open from 7 am to 5 pm daily. Admission is about $ 5. We are in the famous tunnels of Cu Chi, the Viet Cong network of secret underground passages which proved to be a thorn in the side of the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War.

The system claustrophobic tunnel – dug by hand – in a measured time over 120 miles, stretching from the border with Cambodia on the outskirts of what was then Saigon. A virtual city, the tunnel network has been the home of local villagers seeking shelter against bombing, and thousands of Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese army backed by the guerrillas who fought for South Vietnam and forces United States. Here, just beneath the boots of American soldiers, is where the Viet Cong ate, slept and hid and launched surprise attacks deadly.

It is also where a small group of American soldiers – also called Tunnel Rats – part of what must be more frightening in the global game of hide and seek. These rats gained tunnel their way through, crowded hallways dark, trying to find the enemy before the enemy is. Something to think about this Memorial Day.

For obvious reasons, not many soldiers wanted to set foot in these traps pockmarked hell. But these days, the Cu Chi tunnels are a tourist attraction more popular in Vietnam. About 1,000 visitors come daily to the site, located about 45 kilometers from downtown Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon).

Only a few sections of the tunnels below are available today. Have been expanded slightly to accommodate Westerners’ super-sized organizations, but this does not prevent me from fighting for intuition low enough that my back does not touch the ceiling of the earth.

“Are there snakes here?” I asked my Vietnamese guide, who seems almost ridiculous ease in these areas reduced.

“No longer,” he replied with a grin, followed by several rounds of “Keep on coming!

The tourists can make their way through three sections of tunnels ranging from 150 to 650 feet long. If you’re claustrophobic or have a bad back or knees, probably best to stay above the ground – at least when it comes to tunnels.

And do not worry: there’s plenty to do on earth. An exhibition of spikes terrible, once hidden under the trapdoor in the floor of the jungle, craters left by bombs dropped from B-52, U.S. tanks engaged you can climb, mannequins of soldiers from the Vietnam North and Viet Cong guerrillas – is like the Disneyland of death and destruction.

This whole experience gave me a better idea of what American soldiers to pass. One thing to be facing a war memorial or a monument, it is another to get down and dirty in the proverbial trenches, especially with the strange sound cleaning assault rifles in the distance.

“If you fire weapons – AK-47 or M16 – you can do … $ 13 or $ 14 buys 10 balls, “said Nguyen Van Cao, my guide on earth at Cu Chi.” If you do not shoot guns, “he adds,” you can buy ice cream on the side. ”

Like Disneyland.

Nguyen uncle was a colonel in the army of South Vietnam. After the war ended in 1975, his uncle, he spent seven years in a reeducation camp.

“And it was a quick learner,” says Nguyen.

Nguyen woman of North Vietnam. They married in 2005. Marriages between people North and South have become more frequent in recent years, said Nguyen, now that the animosity between the two halves of the country has finally begun to fade.

Before my arrival in Vietnam, he was a little worried that I could face the cessation of hostility in the American war, as they call it. When the carpet bomb a country and spray the landscape with Agent Orange, people can hold grudges.

But the only approach to this Yankee street vendors too enthusiastic desperate to sell Vietnam bamboo bowls and other gadgets.

“What happened, happened,” says Nguyen, adding that most people in Vietnam are too young to remember, even war. Approximately 55 million 87 million inhabitants of the country were born after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

“We do not look backwards,” he said. “We expect in the future.”