We spent our last day in Ho Chi Minh City touring more of the war sites and touristy places including the Reunification Palace and the Cu Chi Tunnels.
We spent the morning on a group tour of the Cu Chi tunnels a little ways outside of town. The tunnels are a popular tourist destination because you can actually see where and how the Viet Cong lived during the war. The tour includes a tour of the subterranean web of hospitals, kitchens and armouries that at one time stretched from Saigon to the Cambodian border. In the region that we visited alone there were more than 200 km of tunnels.
During the tour we saw a short film explaining life in the tunnels and then were able to try moving through one. It was hot, tiny, claustrophobic and dark and I was definitely ready to get out of it even after crawling for only 50m. During the war, the Viet Cong lived underground in these tunnels and practiced guerrilla warfare against the enemy. They were able to move around and attack unseen and pop up in new places and disappear unexpectedly by using and living in the tunnels like rabbits or prairie dogs. To give you an idea of travel time, our guide said that on average it took about 4-5 hours to travel 5km in a tunnel because of how difficult it was to see and move. Our tour guide also showed us several gruesome jungle-style booby traps used against the enemy.
After making it back to the city and having lunch, we explored the Reunification Palace which was built in 1966 to serve as South Vietnam's presidential palace. It is known for being the famous place where the communist tank crashed the gate in April 1975 when the city of Saigon surrendered. We were able to tour many rooms and almost every floor of the building including the basement and roof.
A little tired of learning about the war and how cruel and destructive the American enemy was, Sean and I were ready for a change. We booked bus tickets to leave the next morning for a city on the coast and further north. The beach is always a good remedy for intense history lessons in large doses.
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