Cu Chi Tunnels – Crawling through IT

Swimming pool sized bomb craters, battered tanks, live assault weapons, crawling through long tunnels and crawling through longer anti-American sentiments. These are all the things you will find at your trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels which sit about 60 kilometers outside of Saigon, Vietnam. The Cu Chi Tunnels are famous  (maybe infamous depending on how you look at it) for being a stronghold of the North Vietnamese Army during the Vietnam War. During the war thousands of North Vietnamese lived underground in a patchwork of tunnels and caves reportedly 250 kilometers in length. These caves stretched from the Saigon area to the border of Cambodia and allowed the North Vietnamese Army to literally pop-up anywhere they pleased and attack American soldiers.

We went on a half-day tour to the Cu Chi Tunnel with TM Brothers Café tour group. The tour left Saigon at about 8:00 and returned at about 2:00 with a cost of $9 USD each including admission to the tunnels. Admission to the tunnels without a tour is 80000 Dong or about $4 USD. Our tour guide for the entire day was okay and spoke semi-decent English although his repertoire of jokes got a little tiresome towards the end of the day.

Arriving at the tunnels you get the opportunity  right-away to drop-down into a very small entry/exit point that is covered by foliage making it invisible if you’re just walking through. Pamela went down and she even had a hard time squeezing through the opening and she’s thin. I wasn’t about to attempt it.

Pamela crawling out of a tunnel

After climbing down the tunnels we walked around and looked at an old blown out-tank and old bomb craters left by bombs dropped from B-52 airplanes. We also got to see through the use of mannequins how the North Vietnamese Army used unexploded or captured ordinance to make their grenades, land mines and rockets.

Crater from a bomb dropped by a B-52 airplane

From here we took a walk to the shooting range where Pamela and I got to shoot an AK-47 assault rifle at an outrageous cost of $17 USD for ten bullets. We don’t regret it though as when are we ever going to get to shoot an assault rifle in Vietnam again.  After all, in South-East Asia, with a little money anything is possible. While we were at the shooting range I heard a story of a tourist in Cambodia getting to shoot a water buffalo with a rocket launcher for a total cost of $200 USD. True or not true I don’t know…

After shooting our $17 bucks into the side of a hill we got to go down into the tunnels and crawl through about 50 meters of tunnel that was used back in the war. Supposedly these tunnels have been widened out a bit for tourists. It was a pretty tight fit for us not to mention very hot. We can’t imagine how 16,000 people lived down in the tunnels for all of those years.

Crawling through the tunnels

The end of the tour consisted of watching a 17 minute video about the Cu Chi area which was produced back in the late 60’s. The video bled with anti-American propaganda and was a bit hard to watch from my (DW) perspective. The video starts off with these words and goes on like this (it gets worse) for about 17 minutes:

"Cu Chi, the land of many gardens, peaceful all year round under shady trees ... Then mercilessly American bombers have ruthlessly decided to kill this gentle piece of countryside ... Like a crazy bunch of devils they fired into women and children ... The Americans wanted to turn Chu Chi into a dead land, but Cu Chi will never die."

In any case, it was a good day out and a very interesting place which we would recommend to anyone. All of our photos from the Cu Chi Tunnels can be found here: https://picasaweb.google.com/117257906652666550268/CuChiTunnels?authuser=0&feat=directlink



Cheers for Now –


Pamela and Dave