The 8th of November was a Saturday morning.
We got up at 7am to go to the Cu Chi tunnels, but due to inherent sleepiness needed to find breakfast quickly, and didn’t really have time to walk ourselves down to the Pham Ngu Lao section. So… we walked the other way down Ly Tu Trong, and came across a lady with a gas burner seated upon the footpath. She had some kinds of meat-related items bubbling away in a dish but she also had fresh eggs in a carton so we gestured at those eggs and she nodded and all was understood; and we sat at the plastic tables, on kindergarten-size plastic chairs, on the footpath.
After about three minutes we were bought eggs fried on one side in one of the silver dishes which they simply lifted off the gas burner and bought to your table, sitting atop another plate.Meanwhile a different cheerful lady had come and gone and ascertained whether we wanted coffee. I was getting a bit carefree with my Vietnamese so I asked for ca fe sua da (which is your bog-standard hot white coffee, made with condensed milk), but accidentally got ca fe sua nong, which is the same but iced.
Just the same it was good. We made a bit of a mess trying to get the runny eggs, and bits and pieces from the plate of coriander, cucumber, carrot, and radish into the toasted white buns they bought with the eggs. The locals weren’t doing that. They weren’t breaking up the eggs using the spoon and fork, pulling chunks out of the bun and spooning the egg in small amounts onto the bun, and mopping up egg with the bread, and it was obvious that we should do these things too.
Once again we had a van full of seats for four people – which I’m sure cost Intrepid far too much but that’s their problem – and once again we left half an hour later than the other larger Intrepid group, for the two hour drive out to the Cu Chi tunnels, which took us not much more than an hour. And most of it was going through Saigon, not through countryside. Just before we pulled into the tunnel complex we went through a large plantation of rubber trees which we were going too fast to get a particularly good photo of, but there turned out be an unusual solution at hand.
We arrived at the same time, give or take a few, as the other group, acquired tickets, and then sat down to watch a film about the tunnels, what they were for, how they were used, etc. Only the film was made in 1976, and to call it propaganda would be understating the point somewhat. It started with a lovely video montage of the Cu Chi region, overlaid with some truly kooky but quaint music, then dropped into battle scenes and bomb noises and all that, then told us all about how the tunnels were built to help repel the evil foreign devils.
‘Who are these crazy devils?’, the Vietnamese voice-over lady asked. ‘And what are they doing here, blowing up our peaceful Cu Chi area, and putting out land mines, and sending rockets over?’
It went on like that, even showing some of the young women who fought for the Liberation Army and explaining how good they were at killing Americans, and how they got medals for being No. 1 at killing americans, or for being brave American-killers in battle.
It was an instant modern classic of tragically hilarious proportions.
After that we had something even better; Tuan got up and took the metal metre pointer in hand, and pointed here and there on the map and explained about where the majority of the tunnels were built, how many kilometres were built (270) and how many metres the US managed to destroy (70), and how they kept each individual room ventilated by means of thin bamboo pipes that reached the surface. Not only that, they built the tunnels narrow, so that Americans cannot fit in them.
Tuan didn’t put it quite like that, actually. He said something more like ‘and we know that Americans eat McDonalds so they cannot fit in the narrow tunnels’. This provoked general giggling, both at the back and in the front. From there we did a big lap around the Cu Chi Tunnel complex, looking at the some of the very narrow entrances to the tunnels, preserved old tanks, and even some of the types of bamboo traps which the North Vietnamese used to use, with lots of sharpened bamboo poles waiting for the unwary. Some of them were really cunningly awful.
I thought they had installed sound effects for realism, but as we got closer the shots sounded very real; they had installed a firing range, just over near the gift shop, so that people could fire some of the actual Vietnam war weapons, like your good old Colt .45 and the AK-47 (or more likely one of it’s 99,000 types of rip-off copies); they even had an M-60 which you could let rip with. Insane. Some of the chaps from the other group had a good go on the firing range and enjoyed in mightily, as we saw in their videos later on that afternoon.
On the other side of the shop was a lady demonstrating how to make those circular rice paper rolls (of course…), and then we went over to the main show; the section where you can actually go on down into the old tunnels. There are four joined sections; so you can go crawling through poky humid tunnels for 25m, 50m, 75m or 100m. The guide went ahead of us with the torch but the ladies flaked out after one section and the gents flaked out after 50m. I can’t see how people living under there for up to and including 8 years didn’t just go insane.
Back on the surface, a little further along the trail, we sat down at a wooden table in the shade and had some brothy tea and cassava with a peanut, sugar and salt powder-mix to dip in. This, said Tuan, is what they used to eat most of the time in the tunnels, basically for the duration of the war, so that’s why they serve it as morning tea in the tunnel complex now. It was a fascinating experience to see the whole complex, mainly because of the fiendish level of detail which the Vietnamese applied to the whole project they were carrying out. They the peanut mix because it had salt, sugar and protein, and it’s salt and sugar that you would lose in the dehydrating atmosphere of the tunnels. They gave up their land without giving up their land, by going underground, and dug tunnels at night, hiding the dirt they had excavated in bomb craters.
There was another gift shop at the exit, and we couldn’t resist purchasing here the VCD of the Cu Chi tunnels ‘documentary’, which actually gave you a pretty good look at what the rubber forests look like. However, at the hotel we discovered that it wasn’t the authentic item. The voice over was a different. It was, this time, instead of a slightly bewildering sounding Vietnamese lady, it was a pleasant sounding Vietnamese man, who used terms like ‘medal for bravery’ instead of ‘medal for American-killing’. Such a shame.
Around the corner, near the Ben Thanh market was a restaurant called Pho 2000 which had some large framed photos of when President Clinton had eaten there in 2000, shortly before he ceased being president. In my head I heard the Simpsons episode where Clinton gets cloned by aliens who then try to take over Earth.
He gives an election speech on the news saying ‘I am Clin-ton. As overlord all will kneel trembling before my brutal reign. End Communication.’
Moving on. I had an excellent lunch of Vegetable Curry which was kind of like a laksa but had potato and okra and things, Alice had a beef stir fry, and we all had our last group meal with Tuan. At the end of lunch we heard that a girl from the other group had been taken to hospital with dehydration, but would be OK, and then we went for a stroll with Tuan to organise our bus ticket to Phnom Penh. At the hotel we spent most of the afternoon going through photos from the trip, which now that I think it about stretched as far back as St Petersburg on the 10th of September, and we looked at some videos of people firing serious guns at the Cu Chi firing range. They let you click off five rounds on single to get the idea, then put it on full-scale auto for five rounds, which didn’t take very long to dissipate. The looks on their faces after sending five real bullets into the scenery in about half a second were pretty entertaining.
Adam and Catherine were flying out to Siem Reap the next day, so we went with them over to Pham Ngu Lao and had dinner in a restaurant there, which got funnier and funnier as we went on because no matter what we ordered, something similar but not quite right would come out. I don’t know how it kept happening, but we all ended up eating each other’s desserts and drinks because things came at different times, and you would think they got it wrong and this one must be mine, then something nowhere near what anyone had ordered would come along. So Adam had two desserts; a lemon pancake on top of which he put steamed banana with cream and rum.
We said goodbye to them back at the hotel and then headed out a little later to find the bar the other group had gone to, to have a final drink with them before everyone disappeared and we had to go to Cambodia. Somehow in the last six months I have come to be absolutely rubbish at pool; I was never particularly good but Andy and myself were beaten by one ball after he sunk six. You get the picture. It was a sports bar, run by an Australian, so there were international rugby games playing on three TV’s (England vs Pacific Islands, Australia Vs Italy, Wales Vs South Africa), and the toilets were labelled ‘blokes’ and ‘sheilas’. The last place I have seen a toilet actually labelled like that was in Kings Canyon, near Alice Springs.
Anyway.
We had a good time and agreed with Dat, the leader of the other group, that we would go with him to see Sophie in the hospital tomorrow morning, as it turned out she didn’t have ‘dehydration’ but rather Dengue fever. There must be some communication over names or between languages because neither Dat nor Tuan, nor Kevin – the Cambodian group leader who would be taking the other group to Bangkok – knew what Dengue fever was.
And our room, despite having had the window open all day, still smelled like paint.
Greg
