A hapless paddy on tour

The day started early at 7am but as the sun was shining I didn't mind the getting amongst it. After some breakfast our bus set off for the Cu Chi Tunnels which lie 75 km northwest of Saigon. Our guide was a little annoying but bearable. He informed us several times that Vietnam had not had tourists for 2000 years prior to 1990 . With the collapse of the soviet union in 1990 many of the Communist countries in SEA relaxed laws regarding business and civil liberties in an effort to avoid collapse themselves.

The Cu Chi Tunnels were a real testament to the courage of the Vietnamese people. This village, pro Viet cong, lived underground for more than 25 years living in conditions that can only be described a horrendous. Crawling through the hot claustrophobic tunnels one has to wonder what drove these people to live in these abysmal conditions. Up top, the US continually carpet bombed and sprayed the places with agent orange. The guide explained that many of the children born in the area suffered disabilities as a result of the agent orange and that scanning for pregnant women of the area was now free . What this meant was that Vietnamese women would terminate the pregnancy should any deformation show up on the scan. Its hard to be judgemental in situations like this.

We were also showed the primitive methods the Vietcong used to booby trap the US soldiers. The devices, although crude, were ingenious given the limit resources they had available. Afterwards we visited the War Museum which didn't pull its punch's in regard to the US involvement in Vietnam. The effects of agent orange were clearly photographed along with pictures of US solders carrying the remains of dead Vietcong solders. I was close to tears once I saw the stillborns in formaldehyde. I left in a somber mood for the hostel