Today we travelled about an hour out of Ho Chi Minh City to the tunnels that were used by the Vietcong during the Vietnam war. As you can imagine they are pretty elaborate and go deep into the ground. The first layer sits about 2m down and that is the area that can be used to fight from and to disappear and pop up somewhere else. The second layer has meeting rooms and areas for living and cooking and they are about 5m down. The final layer is small spots to rest and can be as deep as 10m down. Our guide said that the gaps to sleep are about 30cm, so that would be awesome!
Each of the layers can be closed off to appear like they are not there and others have hatches that drop you into pits full of spiky metal taken off the American bombs. It is a total labyrinth and was up to 250km and big parts of it were linked together like a spiders web. Inside are some of the booby traps that were made by the VC to kill anyone following and they are pretty brutal. Pits dug into the ground with spikes from recycled metal dropped as bombs and the ground opens up and down you go. The idea is that the soldier did not die quickly, but screamed the place apart to scare all the other soldiers. Grim, but effective.
One cool thing was the ingeniousness of the VC and the footwear that they made out of rubber from US tyres and they made shoes in two sizes and wore one on back to front, so their footprints were confused and not clear because it looked like two people going in different directions. Smart.
One of the other traps was rigged up over doors and when the door was opened the whole contraption swung down and copped the person in the chest with full on barbs. Once the US soldiers got wize to that, they added a hinge bit at the bottom, so if you held up the first bit, the second bit would take you out.
The biggest tunnel was around 800mm and the smallest about 200mm. Imagine that! When you see footage of the VC scrambling out of them, they make it look so simple.
Despite saying I was not going to go down into the tunnels, FOMO, for which I am famously well known, got the better of me and I said ‘yeah, I’ll give it a crack’ and Sara also thought she might give it a try. So despite our guide saying hold onto your bags in the front, I handed mine to Sepa and down we went……
The first part was quite easy and was about 1m high, that went on for about 4 or 5m until it hit a square pit that was a step down. My foot searched for steps, but no, it was down and about 800mm. I went down and then stepped into the continuing tunnel. I took about 4 steps and with my back rubbing on the roof and my head donging off it, I suddenly decided another 15m was too much for this chicken! I backed up really quickly and made the young Australian guy behind me back up because he had only just navigated the 800 drop without steps. I arrived back to where Sara was in the first bit of tunnel and said something extremely eloquent like ‘F&%$ that’ and scrambled up the steps to light and freedom. I put Sara off, but I also put the Australian guy off and two Spanish people who were also in the first chamber. There may have been more. I created a vibe. I’m a trend setter, if nothing else.
I tried to video my trip, but all I videoed was my own shirt and the audio is probably not for public consumption.
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