Cu Chi Tunnels

This morning we made the two hour journey by road to the Cu Chi Tunnels, a complex of underground passageways that the Viet Cong used in their guerrilla warfare campaign during the Vietnam conflict. Not all the tunnel entrances were as small as the one being demonstrated. by one of the guides in the main blip, but they were pretty claustrophobic once you were in them as the one in extras, of a member of our group creeping through one of them, shows. There was a display of some of the horrendous man traps that were used, designed to maim rather than kill and cause mental trauma amongst enemy troops. it all served to illustrate the awfulness of war.

Back in Saigon /  HCM City after a massive bowl of the local noodle dish, Pho, we visited the War Remnants Museum where the most powerful and moving exhibit was a display of war photography all taken by war photographers who subsequently died in the conflict. Visitors, myself included, moved from photo to photo in sombre silence and there were plenty of moist eyes in evidence, including mine. 

From there we went to the modern Presidential Palace for a tour of various rooms. The end of the war was signalled when a North Vietnamese tank crashed through the palace gates. 

We stopped on the way back to the hotel at the Opera House (see final extra) to buy tickets for the evening performance by The Bamboo Circus, which was absolutely brilliant: a troupe of jugglers and acrobats using all sorts of bamboo props from hats to poles to the type of bamboo coracles we  went crab fishing in in Hoi An.Their timing and stagecraft was mind boggling.