Cu Chi Tunnels

Today we went on a half day trip to the Cu Chi tunnels, which are left over from the Vietnam war. We were picked up from our hostel at around 8:15am and set off towards the tunnels. It was quite a long drive. Our tour guide looked utterly miserable when he picked us up, despite wearing a tshirt that said 'peace and happiness' on the back. He turned out to be a bit of a nutcase. He told us he was a veteran of the war who fought alongside the Americans for 'dirty money'. He kept saying all Americans were fat and ugly, despite there being American people on the tour. But he also kept saying he spoke American, not English, and anyone who spoke English was stupid. Mr Bin, (sp?) as he told us to call him, claimed numerous times to have famous American friends and kept saying 'do you believe me? I'll call him now', without ever actually calling anyone.

Mr Bin showed us round the tunnels and above ground area which had a lot of interesting features that we weren't really told much about. We saw dog traps, booby traps designed for humans and tiny entrances into tunnels. Every now and then we would hear gun fire and it later turned out this was from the shooting range that you could have a go at.  Neither Lauren or I did. At one point Mr Bin was showing something to us and suddenly declared "don't make jokes. 4 of my friends died here. So don't make jokes". I'm not entirely sure anyone was making jokes, and during his explanations Mr Bin kept getting overly animated and emotional to the point where it felt like he was going to start flipping out. He was almost shouting whilst staring directly at people at some points. The whole thing was a bit of a disappointment. I felt it could have been a lot more interesting if we had had a different tour guide which was a shame.

One cool thing though was that we got to go through the tunnels for about 100m. The tunnels are really small and dark and you had to be almost doubled over and crouched to get through them. I didn't make it all the way through as my legs hurt so much but Lauren did. After this we watched a 15 minute film which was overly biased and a bit boring, before heading back to the bus.

We got back to the hostel around 3pm and just collapsed onto the beds. The weather was so hot this morning that even just walking was a lot of effort. We did some planning for the Cambodian leg of our trip, went for dinner and retired to bed.