January 17, 2006

Our last day in Vietnam was spent on the road to Tay Ninh, a province on the Cambodian border, where we were going to see the Cao Dai Temple. On the way, we stopped at the Cu Chi tunnels.

The Cu Chi tunnels are a network of secret tunnels northwest of Saigon that were used by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. The network consisted of three levels of tunnels, living quarters, and meeting rooms. The first level has been widened for tourists. The second level was somewhat widened and the third level has been left in its original form. We all went through the first level, which was actually much narrower than I expected. I had to bend over to walk through and I am by far one of the shorter people in the group. I intended to try the second level, but leave the third level for my more adventurous travelmates. We were told that halfway through the next tunnel we would seen an exit before the third level began. However, the exit was not clearly marked as such, and I wasn't about to turn off by myself, so I ended up going through all three levels, bats and all. I tried to duckwalk all of it (which was the most one could do to avoid crawling), but became much more satisfied with crawling as that minimized the risk of bats flapping past my head. I was much more agitated in the tunnels than I expected and was very happy to see the exit. The tunnel became VERY hot with about 30 of us in there, and we kept stopping for reasons that I could not see. I was fine as long as we kept going, but got myself pretty worked up when we stopped. The tunnels seemed to go on forever. Being in the same conditions as the