Our first night in Ho Chi Mihn we signed up for some tours with our hostel. So, day 2, we rolled out of bed at 6:00 am and managed to get slowly dressed and repacked and moved out of our temporary room and down to our hostel for breakfast. Vietnamese breakfast is AWESOME! Wow. Fresh baguettes, hot from the oven, salad, fresh fruit, eggs, iced Vietnamese coffee (which I will discuss in more detail in a later post). All made fresh and included in the cost of the hostel we were staying in. At that moment I decided I was never leaving. I missed real bread so bad. Bread that wasn't covered in so much sugar it was good for nothing other than coffee cake. Crunchy, well-baked, wonderful bread....
Anyway, after breakfast, we waited around for our tour bus to get there and pick us up for the day. Our tour guide was quite funny, and spoke pretty good English. We spent a good part of the trip to the tunnels listening to his funny stories about the military and life and love in Vietnam. While listening I took a lot of pictures out the bus window and slept a bit. It was hard to stop staring out the windows at the countryside as we drove. It was so different from Korea. For one thing, it was flat. And green. The poverty that is still prevalent in the country is evident form the run down homes, the garbage everywhere, and the lifestyle of many of the people we drove past. But there was life to this country that Korea feels like it is missing. Everywhere you looked, there were homes being built, and new churches and businesses. People relaxed at the roadside stands in hammocks instead of at tables, just talking and sharing food and good times. It was hard to imagine what this country looked like only 40 years ago at the end of the war, and impressive to see how far they have come.
If I thought the drive was going to be eye-opening, I had no clue what I was about to see this day. The first big, emotional stop we made was actually a pitstop for the bus and for us to get lunch. We stopped at a factory that makes those beautiful handmade wooden boxes, vases, screens, and other things you see and think, "Oh, what a pretty Asian box!" They were incredible. And the handmade part was just the beginning. This particular factory was devoted to people who were suffering the effects of agent orange. They were the workers, and the supervisors, and the money from the sales went to helping them. When we were told this before arriving, I was expecting older men who had fought in the war, and were suffering now years later. I was not expecting to encounter men and woman my age who had been suffering from their affiliations and deformities all their lives. I was shocked at what I saw, and I realized then, just how little I knew about their side of the war, and began to get an idea of how devastating this day was going to be. I bought a few small screens made with inlayed mother of pearl and lacquered crushed eggshell and sand. They were beautiful and are now hanging in my living room.
Then we moved on to the goal of our trip.
The Củ Chi Tunnels. We started out by eating our lunch and loading up on bug spray, then ventured into the museum area to watch a movie about the history of the tunnels and the city that was once there. It showed the effects of the war on the people and farmland and gave us a glimpse into what life was like for the TEN YEARS they lived in those tunnels. The video was a bit propaganda-y, but very interesting. I, for one, can not imagine having to live my life in tiny tunnels, underground, unable to stand, in the pitch black. It had to be terrifying. Ten years, spent in those tunnels, digging with little hand axes and bamboo.
After the video, we walked around on the surface, over the paths of the tunnels, looking at tunnel opening, air vents, the "large" openings for the elderly or pregnant, and at all the crazy traps they built around the tunnels. As horrifying as it all was, looking at their booby traps made me think of Data from The Goonies and "booty traps." This is not intended to take away from the ingenuity of the traps they made. And most of them were made using unexploded bombs, weapons, and other things they stole from the opposing forces, then melted down and made into spikes. The tunnels were even more amazing. All the planning that went into the ditches, and camouflage and which way the tunnels lead, incredible. I also spent a good deal of this dreading the next part of the tour, going down into the
tunnels. Small, dark, enclosed spaces and myself tend to mix poorly. But, I remained determined to at least attempt to walk through the tunnels. I was curious to see if i could have pushed that fear away if it meant life or death. Could I live ten years in the dark, if the other option was death? After our foray into the dark, my answer is.......... Maybe. I was one of the last to go through the tunnel. I made the mistake of watching several people ahead of me back out in terror, I closed my eyes, held my breathe, and plunged into the dark. Which ended up being not so dark. Most of this section of the tunnel was pretty well lit, though I did panic a bit in the one dark section, the little girl ahead of me cheered me on and lead me out. But, I count it as a success.
After the tunnels, we relaxed for a bit with a sampling of the tea and root vegetable, tapioca, that they would have subsisted on while living in the tunnels. It actually wasn't too bad. Tasted like a sweet potato, and I mean a REAL sweet potato, not the orange yams we call sweet potatoes in the states. Then it was back on the bus, and heading home. This trip involved a lot less talking and a lot more sleeping and staring out the window deep in thought. We had almost arrived back at our hostel when our tour guide mentioned that it was possible for us to be dropped off at
The War Remnants Museum which was only about ten minutes from our hostel. We had been planning to go there anyway at some point so we figured this was as good a time as any.
The first floor started out okay, lots of banners, flyers, posters, articles, and other things from all over the worlds, requesting the US pul out of Vietnam. Interesting, but not to emotional or distressing. We made out way around and up to the second floor, and were immediately confronted with photos of bomb victims, dismembered bodies, murdered children... The list goes on. Every horrible image you could imagine, we saw. All the horrible things people do in war, we saw photo proof of the American soldiers preforming them to a tee. I know that the vietnamese soldiers did awful things to our soldiers as well, but this was image of old, infirm, pregnant, babies. Being cut up and posed with like prize deer. It was horrifying and made me ashamed of my country, ashamed of where I was from, and left me hoping everyone else in the museum thought I was german because of my blonde hair, or a canadian because I spoke English. It is definitely one thing to know the horrors that are going on in war, and a completely different thing to see the images of it. From this room we went into the gallery dedicated to the immediate and lingering effects of agent orange. By this time I was so overwhelmed, horrified, and emotionally broken down from the day that I didn't spend as much time here as the other rooms. I will just say, it is sick that we did what we did, it hurt everyone, and everything, and I hope that the people who made those decisions are horribly, horribly, ashamed of what they did. It destroyed lives for generations. Children are still being born suffering for the effects of those chemicals we dropped, and they will continue to be for a long time. Land is still barren because of it. That is all I have to say about it, and after that room, both Rikki and I were done.
We walked out to the street and found a cafe to decompress in and gather our thoughts. We got some more great food, and decided to head back to the hostel for a shower and a rest. Both of us were pretty much done emotionally for the day, and we needed some time to relax and process the things we had seen and learned. After a nap and a revitalizing shower, we walked around looking for a place for dinner. We found a little Pho place near our hostel, and ordered some food and some beers. After a little while we realized that the other people in the shop were... how do I say this nicely... ladies of the night?? We will go with that. At first we just thought they were meeting here to eat, but when the little old lady running the place started giving them orders and having them set up tables for themselves to eat at before they went out into the night, we figured out she was the madame. It was, needless to say, and interesting and slightly surreal end to a very draining, but spectacular day.
The last few pictures are just a few of my favorites from the day. I choose not to post any pictures from the museum because they were far too graphic.
