A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
Our first stop in our Tuesday tour of the countryside was Cu Chi, a tourist trap where hundreds of kilometers of tunnels were built and used during the wars with the French and Americans. I say "tourist trap" not because there were a lot of tourists there at the time (Ninh and I were practically alone at 8:30 on a Tuesday morning), but because it's clearly designed primarily for foreign tourists and has been modified in such a way that it bears little resemblance to what it was like when the tunnels were used. Kind of a Disneyfied battlefield visit.

Ninh and I got a private tour given by a gung-ho North Vietnamese guy in army fatigues. We began with a short hike through a young forest and a propaganda video, as usual. It was a new style video, however -- the footage purported to come from 1967, and began by describing the Cu Chi district as a bucolic paradise in which rural families laughed and played and grew rice and city dwellers came to enjoy picnic lunches on the banks of the Saigon River.

That was the "before", of course. To hear them tell the tale, you'd think the U.S. arbitrarily decided to bomb the hell out of it just for the sake of killing bunnies and ruining the happiness of adorable little Vietnamese children. rather than maybe because there were hundreds of guerilla soldiers hiding and conducting warfare from underground. The American B-52's came in like "insane devils" to lay waste to this innocent country Eden.

It was an interesting tour, however. The path from one tunnel entrance/exhibit to another meandered around quite a bit due to the huge bomb craters dotting the landscape like acne scars. In the interest of allowing entrance to tourists larger than your average malnourished VC soldier, they have opened up fairly large staired entrances to each labeled (in English only) and roofed chamber. Most were shown in sets of two -- you would enter one dimly fluorescently lit chamber, say a sleeping area for example, then you would have to bend over and waddle through an uncomfortable and dark little tunnel to an adjoining chamber with a similar set of stairs to the outdoors. Those who have traveled with me will be impressed that I did this at all -- I loathe caves, caverns, tunnels, and all things underground. I did feel some pressure to feign enjoyment, however, since Ninh was so nice as to take me there.

After several of these tunnel pairs, a photo taken at a war room table with me and a bunch of mannequins dressed like VC officers, and an overlarge sample of manioc, the mealy potato-like root that the VC considered a staple food during the war, we were off to our next destination.

© 2002 Katy Warren



posted by Katy at 4:09 AM