Day Trip to Cu Chi Tunnels

At 8:00 the next morning we went on our Cu Chi Tunnels tour on a bus with about 18 people and a great guide. The roads were pretty bad, and we drove quite a lot (about five or six hours that day), but it was nice getting out to the countryside. Our morning stop was to see the biggest Cao Dai temple (Holy See) near the town of Tay Ninh and to witness a ceremony at noon. Cao Dai is a Vietnamese religion “invented” in the 1920’s, a religion that combines all major religions (Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism) in a “peaceful” spirit of “acceptance”. Good in theory, but when we arrived, we got the distinct feeling that we were trespassing on or interfering with a kind of cult. Most of the followers seemed like they’d been there from the start – the average age was well over 60.

Since it was the day of the full moon in September, it was one of the most important days of the year for them. Because of that, the grounds of the “temple” were unusually crowded and we were surrounded and being groped, hit and even kicked by people of all ages. I had never felt so uncomfortable – it was like I was in Waco, Texas and waiting for the last “sermon” from David Koresh. The ceremony was really strange. Luckily when we were asked to take off our sandals before we entered, we brought them with us, as one guy in our group had his nicked and had to walk around barefoot for a couple of hours before he was able to replace them with a pair of cheap, local thongs.

The Cu Chi area was the secret (or not so secret) headquarters of the Viet Cong army in the south. It was heavily bombed by the Americans, and you could still see huge craters in the fields as you approached the tunnel area. The Viet Cong built huge networks of tunnels (over 200 miles of tunnels by their estimation), dating back to the 1950’s. Going through the tunnels made you appreciate how they lived, and made you wonder how any of the American tunnel rats came home with their sanity intact. The tunnels were extremely narrow (a good workout for people who hadn’t exercised very much over the past three months), and they had been widened for tourists!

It was a long day, but worth it if you had time to kill and you wanted to see a bit of the local history. When we got back to Kim’s Café, we noticed that no one had signed up for the three day Mekong Delta tour (they usually posted the numbers of people and nationalities of those that had signed up – a great idea!) so we signed up.