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Oh dear. I fear these LONG blogs are becoming a habit. The last one I warned about you getting a cup of tea. This time, how about cooking dinner also. I'm expecting 100s of comments soon from you all to tell me to stop waffling. To be fair, Cambodia and Vietnam are two countries with incredibly interesting histories. After I leave Vietnam, the history lessons will hopefully disappear and a nice, simple blogs will be left. Until then, brace yourselves, and enjoy. PS - lots of photos this time, as the connection here is mega-quick :)

Of rivers and war

Simon Wadsworth
2006-09-04 16:01:05

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of 'The Tunnels of Cu Chi'.

Actually seeing and going through them though, really brought home to me how incredible the system was. I got to go into a number of tunnels - all of which have been enlarged to allow us fat westerners to not get stuck, and still they were small, even for a dwarf like myself. Martin, at 6'2" was having problems. There are 3 levels of tunnels, going down to 10m as I
mentioned, and large rooms for eating, working and healing. One was so small it took me to go down first and not scream before wonky teeth, muddy river, but hey - i've got a cool hat others dared to follow - the claustrophobic might want to think twice. There were a couple of dim lights, similar to what would've been used at the time, and bats occasionally flying past me causing me todrop my camera. And humid, so so humid. One 25m stretch was plenty - and the VC lived down them for months at a time. It really put it into perspective. Before leaving, were also shown some booby traps mostly involving long, metal spikey things, and I tried some Cobra Whiskey - complete with said cobra in the bottle.

That's about it for Ho Chi Minh. I got some lengths in at a 50m swimming pool, spent half a day at a Water Park (complete with wave pool! Oh yes..) which brough back lots of childhood memories, and bumped into the Kampot crowd at a bar!! Bumping into people when travelling is surprisingly a very common experience, but always a pleasant surprise when it happens.

Finally, 'Good Morning Vietnam', Apocalypse Now, 'Nam, The War: everyone's got some sort of impression of Vietnam, true or false, mostly thanks to America and Hollywood. What's happened in the last 50 years is far too complex
to begin to describe in this blog, but let's just say it was screwed up. Take the war for example, costing America $200B, it bombed every rail bridge, and 70% of all villages, while over 50,000 Americans died. However, as one VC once said, if America killed 10 times as many 'Charlie', they would still lose. There were some horrific attrocities I've been reading about, including the My Lai Massacre and the Tet Offensive. 200,000 South Vietnamese were killed, over 1 Million North Vietnamese and VC, while nearly 4 million civilians were injured or killed. Another 300,000 people are still 'missing' and today, over 3 million have been badly deformed physically and mentally, mostly by the Agent Orange chemicals that are still present throughout the land. Leaving, after more than 10 years of military involvement, and using more than 7 times the amount of bombs and ammunition they used in WWII, America left, without ever declaring war on Vietnam. I know everyone likes to blame the Americans, but I'm afraid this time they would be right to.

After the South fell, and communism took over, besides recovering from a truly battered country - economically, socially and physically, even today there's still a few rifts. 1000s of the former educated population of the south were sent to "re-education camps" (or to you and me, forced-labour camps) - sometimes up to 7 years in horrible conditions. Even today they are not allowed their old jobs back as teachers, doctors etc, but instead can be found all over Saigon as moto drivers.

I'll stop suddenly here to give you something to think about. Don't let this give you a negative impression of Vietnam today though. It's an awesome country and I'll be hoping to discover this more over the coming days. Hopefully that's the last of the educational and LONG blogs you'll have to endure. I'm now about to go on an epic 22-hour bus journey north to Hoi An -
god help me! But with FAR too many books (15) currently in my bag (including guidebooks though), I doubt I'll get bored.

Missing all of you! Simon