Love is in Stiles: Cu Chi Tunnels

Cu Chi Tunnels

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On our second day in Ho Chi Minh City in August we took a tour of the Cu Chi Tunnels. Cu Chi is a few hours outside the city. The tunnels were an underground network that supposedly went for miles. The Viet Cong used the tunnels for cooking, sleeping, fighting, moving around, etc. The tunnels had a huge part in defeating the American soldiers. Our guide told us that the occasional time the Americans could find one of the tunnels, they had to send in one of the recruits not of American descent (European or Mexican) to try and wriggle in, as the Americans were far too big.

They had a section for tourists to crawl through, that they had made bigger for us, because the original tunnels would be totally unusable for most people. This site also had a strong anti-American theme, but after that war who can blame them?

Here a worker, dressed as a soldier, is showing us one of the secret entrances to the tunnels. He is standing in the hole, and covering the wood lid with leaves to disguise it.

We got to try out the tunnel entrance. I look happy here, but when I crouched down, I barely fit, and immediately got claustrophobic.

Here is an entrance to one of the original tunnels.

This was us going into a 'bunker' where they showed us what one of the 'fighting bunkers' would have looked like underground.

Since they also cooked and lived underground they had to vent their smoke outside, and this tiny pipe peeking out is how!

For a few extra dollars we got to shoot guns at the shooting range during the tour! I had never touched, or heard, a gun in real life. You pay buy the bullet so we each only got to shoot 5 times, and I couldn't even tell where my bullets went (so we will pretend they went right into the bulls eye). Also I felt like my ears were going to explode, even with those headphone things. But- so fun!