Millions of motorbikes and memories of war
Trip Start
May 06, 2007
1
146
166
Trip End
Jul 24, 2008
Ho Chi Minh City,
Ho Chi Minh City,
Vietnam
Thursday, May 15, 2008
On my first night in Saigon I met Tina, a Swiss girl, who I ended up spending the rest of my Saigon time with. We spent our first full day walking around exploring some of the different neighborhoods. We also visited the War Remnants Museum, a disturbing collection of images of the atrocities committed against the Vietnamese people in what is referred to here as the American War (aka the Vietnam War to those stateside). The bulk of the museum was full of graphic pictures and attached stories, including chilling quotes by some of the war photographers describing how they would ask the soldiers to wait a second before killing people so they could get one last shot of them alive. They also described and showed in graphic detail the multi-generational effects of Agent Orange. Herbicidal warfare is pretty gruesome for multiple generations. Not a good thing.
The next day Tina and I joined a day tour to the Cao Dai Temple and Cu Chi Tunnels. Cao Dai is a religion that's only found in Vietnam which essentially combines parts of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Christianity. Their prophets include Confucius, Jesus, and Victor Hugo, among others - quite an interesting mixture. The temple itself was beautiful, with very whimsical, bright pink, blue, green, and yellow decorations. We were there for their noon-time prayer session which was very interesting to see. A 4-piece band and a choir led everyone in chanting while they sat on their knees and bent down to the ground.
The Cu Chi Tunnels are a massive network of underground tunnels including living areas that were used by the Viet Congs during the war to gain access to the south. The tunnels had hidden entrances, some of which were under water. They were also built to be just big enough to fit an average-sized Vietnamese person and small enough that an average American soldier wouldn't be able to fit through the entrance. Various types of booby traps were scattered throughout the tunnel, especially near the entrances, in order to catch any Americans who did find an entrance and attempted to enter it. Knowing that the tunnels existed, but unable to infiltrate them, the US proceeded to essentially bomb the hell out of the area. Rather than killing the VC soldiers and destroying the tunnel network, the widespread attacks instead ruined the surrounding jungles and killed or injured all the villagers in the area. Not exactly effective.
Although the entire tunnel network is still intact, there are only small portions of it open to the public. The area we visited included a number of different entrances/exits and also a display of the different types of booby traps. We were also able to climb through a small section of the tunnel that's been made 40% wider to accommodate the size of Western tourists. I was quite happy that they were expanded since they were still incredibly small and even started to make me a bit claustrophobic by the end - they were much shorter and narrower than the underground city in Turkey or the tunnel in Sarajevo. I couldn't imagine even attempting to live in these tunnels.
That night 6 of us from the tour group joined up with about 10 other people from our various guest houses and went for a fun night out. We started out at an Irish bar that had a really good cover band and then finished the night off at a dance club. Good times were had by all.
