I have done it again....I am on holiday and I keep booking things that get me up early in the morning. But at least this time, it is for the one thing that I have wanted to do for all the time that I have been in Vietnam. It was to go and visit the tunnels that were used during the Vietnamese War by the Viet Cong to hide from the Americans.

Although it was just booked as a trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels we had 2 other places to go and visit first before we even got there. The first place was a factory which employs only disabled people and they produce vases, wooden furniture and wooden pictures made up of inlayed egg shells and mother of pearl. We were given a tour of the factory and then not surprisingly led to the sales showroom and given the opportunity to purchase these goods.

Our next stop was the Caodai Great Temple where at 12:00 every day (also at 6am and 6pm) the monks and nuns are called to service. Tourists and visitors are allowed in the temple during prayer time but must be up on the balcony and strictly no talking. We stayed and watched the first 15 minute of the service and as they prayed/chanted in their own language it was interesting to listen to but we couldn't understand it (and neither did our Vietnamese tour guide). This temple serves as the headquarters of one of Vietnam’s most interesting indigenous religions, Caodaism. The temple was built between 1933 and 1955 and the religion combines secular and religious philosophies of the east and west, and was based on séance messages revealed to the group’s founder Victor Hugo.

We had a quick stop off for lunch at a restaurant where even our tour guide told us not to eat the meat there as he didn’t want us to get ill from it, and he recommended we eat only the vegetable rice or noodles dish.

Finally we arrived at the Cu Chi tunnels at around 14:30 where we first had to pay our admission charge as this was not included in our tour price. This subterranean web of hospitals, kitchens and armouries once stretched from Saigon to the Cambodian border. In the district of Cu Chi alone there where more than 200km of tunnels. Even though the tunnel that is accessible to tourists has been enlarged so that Westerners can fit down there it was still a claustrophobic experience that I didn’t really enjoy but it was something that I had to do while in Vietnam.

While here we also got to watch a video about the tunnels and the Vietnamese war as seen from the Vietnamese point of view and also got shown some of the traps and weapons that were used during the war against the Americans. They even had a shooting range where you could fire different types of machine guns, but this was an extra charge and you had to buy a minimum of 10 bullets to have a go. I declined.

In the evening I headed out to the same restaurant on the street that I had eaten at the night before as it was very good food and served cheap drinks. When I got here some of the same people I had been talking to last night so immediately I had some company for dinner. I stayed here all night as drinks in the tourist bars on the main street were 2 or 3 times as much to buy.

While sitting at the restaurant you are approached many many times by people who are selling things from bracelets, fake photocopied books to cigarettes. One boy came along and stopped beside us and then got a small snake out of a pot and I was amazed at what he did. He took the snake, which was still alive and put it up his nose. Then he pulled it out through his mouth, and while holding the tail and the head he continued to pull it back and forth through his nose and mouth. How does anyone realise that they can do this? You must watch the video that I have uploaded.

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