Cu Chi Cu Chi Cu!
Get off my obstacle Private Pies! Arrived in Nam to the bright lights and mass chaos that is Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) and was astounded by it's sheer craziness. It puts Bangkok to shame and the number of mopeds buzzing around like supercharged hairdryers is quite simply ridiculous. Coming from laid back Cambodia into this doldrum of activity took a bit of getting used to although the difference was apparent as soon as I crossed the border.
The first thing that took my eye (apart from the 12 year old sentry sat on a roof with fully loaded machine gun!) was unsurprisingly a Cow. Merely 200 metres from the Hows in Cambodia this fella was entirely different, chocolate brown in colour, horned up and he'd definitely been dodging the salad! To sum it up Nam is a lot more advanced than Cambodia.
My main purpose in hitting Saigon was to do a bit of war stuff. Growing up on a diet of Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now had left me completely intrigued as to how a nation as small and poverty stricken as Vietnam could somehow manage to completely nail the giant American juggernaut. So at 8am the next morning it was off to the Cu Chi tunnels for me to see how the Vietcong (VC) had enacted their master plan of guerila warfare. Switch off now if this war shit is boring you.
Quite frankly I was amazed at this place and completely in awe at the VC's ingenuity and ability to turn their surroundings into the most effective weapon a war of this scale has ever seen. Guided by out tour rep 'Billy' who was a Vietnamese ex US Marine alcoholic who clearly loved Vietnam and now resides back here, we were taken round the Cu Chi area. First up was one of the holes the VC used to dig and hide in underground in order to find out where the yanks were and what they were up to. Billy invited us to try and fit into this and i'm telling you it's one of the tightest holes i've ever seen (stop it!). When the slightly chubby American girl went for her turn the whole party breathed in for her and somehow she just managed to squeeze her portly cheeks into the gap. It did however take 3 of us to haul her out and I almost put my back out in the meantime!
After seeing a number of gruesome and lethal looking traps including the aptly named ' Scrotum ripper' it was off to the star attraction, the tunnel system, which was the main reason the VC won the war and caused the yanks to go home. In a nutshell the little fellas lived under there on 3 levels and it was all designed to withstand bombing, flooding and enable the VC to launch surprise attacks, gather intelligence and all kinds of other things while the yanks didn't have a scooby where they were, let alone what they were up to or how many of them there were. To say the tunnels are compact is an understatement. Getting a yank soldier in there would be like trying to squeeze a watermelon into a keyhole, it just wasn't gonna happen.
Part of the trip allowed us to go through a tunnel so off we went slightly apprehensive but not one to look like a poof in front of the rest of the group in I popped. I shit you not these things weren't made for me and after about 10 yards I was already struggling to breathe and beginning to wonder whether i'd come out of it alive. Complete darkness, no idea where I was going and shuffling down in my tightest wicket keeper stance like a baby kangaroo I managed to reach the halfway mark (30 yards!) just about alive. With a tighter 30 yards to go to the end I decided to bail here along with the 6ft 5in Surrey boy in front of me and then proceeded to sweat profusely as my heart rate gradually returned over the next 2 hours. The fact that these VC dudes lived in these places for years is just fucking stupid and I thank the lord I was born in a place where houses and shit like that are pretty big. There is no way I would ever make it as a mole!
A good day out was topped off with a night on the lash back in nutty Saigon with a good squadron of people we'd met on the trip. Couple of English lashes, Big Si from Surrey and a couple of Canadian tree hugger type hippy boys made it a good night and I also hooked up with Kate and Bec again to continue our travels through Nam. Great start to the Communist adventure and now off to power northwards and see what else this ingenius nation has to offer.
Get off my obstacle Private Pies! Arrived in Nam to the bright lights and mass chaos that is Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) and was astounded by it's sheer craziness. It puts Bangkok to shame and the number of mopeds buzzing around like supercharged hairdryers is quite simply ridiculous. Coming from laid back Cambodia into this doldrum of activity took a bit of getting used to although the difference was apparent as soon as I crossed the border.
The first thing that took my eye (apart from the 12 year old sentry sat on a roof with fully loaded machine gun!) was unsurprisingly a Cow. Merely 200 metres from the Hows in Cambodia this fella was entirely different, chocolate brown in colour, horned up and he'd definitely been dodging the salad! To sum it up Nam is a lot more advanced than Cambodia.
My main purpose in hitting Saigon was to do a bit of war stuff. Growing up on a diet of Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now had left me completely intrigued as to how a nation as small and poverty stricken as Vietnam could somehow manage to completely nail the giant American juggernaut. So at 8am the next morning it was off to the Cu Chi tunnels for me to see how the Vietcong (VC) had enacted their master plan of guerila warfare. Switch off now if this war shit is boring you.
Quite frankly I was amazed at this place and completely in awe at the VC's ingenuity and ability to turn their surroundings into the most effective weapon a war of this scale has ever seen. Guided by out tour rep 'Billy' who was a Vietnamese ex US Marine alcoholic who clearly loved Vietnam and now resides back here, we were taken round the Cu Chi area. First up was one of the holes the VC used to dig and hide in underground in order to find out where the yanks were and what they were up to. Billy invited us to try and fit into this and i'm telling you it's one of the tightest holes i've ever seen (stop it!). When the slightly chubby American girl went for her turn the whole party breathed in for her and somehow she just managed to squeeze her portly cheeks into the gap. It did however take 3 of us to haul her out and I almost put my back out in the meantime!
After seeing a number of gruesome and lethal looking traps including the aptly named ' Scrotum ripper' it was off to the star attraction, the tunnel system, which was the main reason the VC won the war and caused the yanks to go home. In a nutshell the little fellas lived under there on 3 levels and it was all designed to withstand bombing, flooding and enable the VC to launch surprise attacks, gather intelligence and all kinds of other things while the yanks didn't have a scooby where they were, let alone what they were up to or how many of them there were. To say the tunnels are compact is an understatement. Getting a yank soldier in there would be like trying to squeeze a watermelon into a keyhole, it just wasn't gonna happen.
Part of the trip allowed us to go through a tunnel so off we went slightly apprehensive but not one to look like a poof in front of the rest of the group in I popped. I shit you not these things weren't made for me and after about 10 yards I was already struggling to breathe and beginning to wonder whether i'd come out of it alive. Complete darkness, no idea where I was going and shuffling down in my tightest wicket keeper stance like a baby kangaroo I managed to reach the halfway mark (30 yards!) just about alive. With a tighter 30 yards to go to the end I decided to bail here along with the 6ft 5in Surrey boy in front of me and then proceeded to sweat profusely as my heart rate gradually returned over the next 2 hours. The fact that these VC dudes lived in these places for years is just fucking stupid and I thank the lord I was born in a place where houses and shit like that are pretty big. There is no way I would ever make it as a mole!
A good day out was topped off with a night on the lash back in nutty Saigon with a good squadron of people we'd met on the trip. Couple of English lashes, Big Si from Surrey and a couple of Canadian tree hugger type hippy boys made it a good night and I also hooked up with Kate and Bec again to continue our travels through Nam. Great start to the Communist adventure and now off to power northwards and see what else this ingenius nation has to offer.
posted by Freely at 1:31 AM
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