Sunday, 27 April 2014

Day 110 – Ho Chi Minh City, Cu Chi tunnels.

I got 21 seconds to go, I’ve got 21 seconds to go… ok 21 days until home but still. The main thing to see and do in and around the city is the Cu Chi tunnels, these are tunnels that the Vietnamese created and lived in to hide and protect themselves when the war was on. The tunnels were about an hour or so away from the city, so we decided to go for the half day tour, which picked us up at 8am.
The tunnels were really interesting and learnt a lot. A few of the facts I learnt was that the sandals they wore were bigger at the front than at the back to fool the American troops into thinking they were going the other way. So the footprints that got left in the ground were the opposite way to where they were going, quite clever if you ask me! Another is they used to cook all the food for the day early in the morning and the smoke used to come out of a tube at least 1km away from the kitchen to mislead the troops too. The reason they did it early in the morning was so it could be covered up and to make it look like fog. We also had the chance to try some Tapioca, it just tasted a bit like potato, it was very bland.
We got to walk around or more crouch our way through some of the tunnels, which they have made slightly bigger for tourists. Vietnamese people are so small compared to the average westerner.


We were shown many of the traps they used against the American troops, there were at least 10 different ways of catching them and a lot of the time it was just to injure them but not kill them so they could go back and find them, so kind of like winning a prize.

We got back to Ho Chi Minh City around 3pm and had a little chill for the afternoon as it was very hot out at the tunnels. We then met two girls who we’ve known since Halong Bay for dinner, which was lovely and discovered they’re going to Cambodia tomorrow too so I’m sure we will bump into them again.

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