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The previous day we had booked a tour to visit Cu Chi Tunnels, this meant an early start, catching the bus from outside our hotel at 8.15. Boooo! This was also our first experience of an Asian bus, basically if you're taller than 5'5" you need to be a contortionist to fit into the seats.
Cu Chi is a district about 30km outside of Ho Chi Minh City that is made up of villages and Jungle, during the war the Americans attacked this area. In order to protect themselves from the attacks the Vietnamese used a series of underground tunnels which covered a distance about 250km. The tunnels could be as small as 80cm x 80cm and were in total darkness; larger areas were also dug out to make hospitals, kitchens and meeting rooms. The Vietnamese sometime had to spend weeks at a time these tunnels and the conditions were horrific.
Our tour guide Mr Fu was brilliant and had lots of interesting facts to tell us on the way round. We had the opportunity to go into a section of the tunnels that had been dug out so to fit us massive westerner's in, however they were still only about 3ft high and crawling through was a nightmare. We both went right down to the bottom level and struggled through to end however I can't imagine having to spend any longer than 10 minutes down there.
Part of the tour showed different traps used by the Vietnamese to kill American soldiers, these were pretty gruesome and mainly consisted of the soldiers failing into a hole in the ground before being impaled with a spear in a ridiculously painful place like under the arms or in the bottom of their feet!
When we got back to the bus we were the first there and so took the front seats which were slightly better than the rest. Turns out that the annoying American woman who I'd wanted to throttle the whole way round the tour believed she owned these seats and was not impressed that we had taken them. She had a bit of paddy and then declared to the whole bus "can we get these windows open, somebody needs to start using deodorant" and sat holding her nose for the first 10 minutes of the journey. Bearing in mind everyone had just crawled through tiny tunnels in 33 degree heat no one was smelling great but I'm pretty sure I didn't smell that bad. It did make me want to put my armpits right in her face though!!
That evening we ate at a proper street stall with all the locals. After ordering some mystery meat with rice and some spring rolls I found a lovely insect in the soy sauce (I'm still convinced it was cockroach). I really didn't want to eat the food however Scott pretty much forced me, so now if I have cockroaches growing inside me it's all his fault!!
P.s. All our photos from this day are on the camera and not my phone so I just added one of me and my new little friend
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