Confronting Fears

So it was time to leave beautiful Mui Ne, and soon I was back on the bus headed to my final city destination in Vietnam - Saigon. Okay technically it's called Ho Chi Minh City, but Saigon is the name that the residents there still use, and 'Saigon' has a much more romantic-sounding name anyway.

Hugh had arrived there the day before we so we decided to share a room together again. Like Hanoi, Saigon was big, busy, and crawling from top to bottom with maniacal motorbikes zipping left and right. I spent my first day just sorta wandering around, checking out the city views, and arranging my exit from Vietnam. Later that afternoon I went and saw the War Remnants Museum, and what a harsh experience that was, let me tell you.

The War Remnants Museum used to be called The European and American War Atrocities Museum, but apparently that name offended a few too many tourists. The museum is a mainly photographic exhibition of all the terrors and horrors of war. Concentrating mainly on the more recent Vietnam War, the main gallery contains hundreds of shocking photographs of soldiers in combat, victims lying dying or dead in the rice paddies, B-52's dropping bombs on villages, and especially emotional images of villagers fleeing for their lives. They have a few war machines and weapons on display as well, but the most shocking part of the museum was the section dedicated to the horrors of Agent Orange.

Besides dropping bombs and napalm on innocent Vietnamese pheasants and farmers, the Americans sprayed a deadly chemical called Agent Orange all over southern Vietnam. It was the first time, perhaps, in war history that a nation has ever declared war on the land of a so-called enemy country, and by spraying this chemical freely over the landscape thousands of square kilometres of forests and rice fields were rendered dead and toxic. The worst horror was yet to come, as Agent Orange worked itself into the ecosystem, poisoning all plant and animal life for decades to come, and causing horrible birth deformations in the babies of the war survivors. There were several photos of Vietnamese born with extreme disfigurations, and also on display were two large jars, and you'll never believe what was inside these jars...

Inside each of the jars was a human fetus, but horribly, horribly disfigured. And yes, they were real fetuses. They were so nearly unrecognizable as human, it looked like they came straight out of a horror film. I was absolutely apalled and almost too scared to get close to the jars to examine the babies, for fear that they might suddenly move or something... It's a shocking image that I'll carry with me for the rest of my life...

On my second day I went for a tour of the famous Cu Chi Tunnels, which was yet another testimony to the horrors of war. The Cu Chi Tunnels are a long network of tunnels built underneath a massive area of land that was occupied by the Americans during the war. Dug out by the Cu Chi guerrilas, they were used to hide the combatants and launch surprise attacks against the Americans. So ingenious were there design that the Americans were never able to find them during the war despite knowing of their existence, and even massive carpet bombing of the area failed to destroy these tunnels.

Today you can examine part of the tunnels, as well as the many horrific booby traps that were set up in the jungle by the Vietnamese. Seriously, these Vietnamese thought of like 101 nasty ways to kill advancing soldiers, and it's morbidly fascinating in a gruesome way to see all these traps. The tunnels themselves are actually remarkably tiny, so narrow in fact that the average Westerner can't fit through most of them. Many of the tunnels had entrances that measured only 50 cm. by 50 cm! Tourists are now allowed to climb through a portion of these tunnels to experience what it must've been like to live, hunt, and kill in these tunnels, and I had serious doubts as to whether or not I would enter them.

Most of you probably don't know this, but I'm more than a little on the claustophobic side, something which seems to worsen the older I get, and the idea of going in these tiny DARK earthen tunnels that burrow anywhere from three to ten metres under the ground scared the shit out of me. I can't imagine a more frightening place for a claustophobe to have to crawl through, and just knowing what happened in these tunnels makes the thought even more scary. Talk about an area with Bad Juju!

I decided to be brave and venture into the tunnels...

The portion that we were allowed to climb through was 80 metres long, a distance that to me sounded like 80 km., but fortunately they have escape shafts every 20 metres. I decided to go in cause I didn't want to feel like a wuss, would know that I would regret not being brave later on, and must admit that I was slightly curious as to what they looked/felt like inside.

The experience was not a pleasant one...

The tunnels are indeed long and very, very dark. And full of sharp corners and twists. They have small red lights inside, but they're very dim, and when you're in a line of tourists crawling through most often the person in front of you is blocking the light completely. I've never known darkness so complete and suffocating as inside those tunnels. It was 360 degrees of blackness. The roof was so low I had to crawl on my hands and knees, and couldn't turn around even if I wanted to. And it was so hot and steamy in there. It was like the air in there hasn't moved or changed in decades...you could barely breathe in the heat and in mere seconds you were soaked and dripping with your own sweat. This is how I imagine what hell must be like. I just pushed myself on and tried to talk myself through it. Freaking out would only make matters worse.

20 metres was more than enough for me, and so at the first chance I took the escape route and returned to the surface. I was very, very happy to return to fresh air and daylight, and although most of my tour group opted to crawl through longer, I didn't feel like a wuss. Crawling through those 20 metres felt like it was much, much longer to me, and I'm happy to say that's it's something that I accomplished, and hope I never have to repeat ever again! Later on I found out that the tunnel ahead of where I exited became so tiny that everyone had to squeeze through on their stomachs! Dear god that would've scared me shitless, and I'm even more glad now that I left through that first exit.

Besides the above, I spent the rest of my time in Saigon just relaxing, and doing a little shopping. Fake CD's are *ridiculously cheap* here, and so I bought....about twenty! And yet altogether it only cost me about six bucks for all of them! Blur, Snow Patrol, Norah Jones, The Strokes, Elton John, Moby, Linkin Park, Westlife, Groove Armada...they're all coming home with me!

Also, on my last night in town Michael, Bobbi, and Myriam rolled into town, and we met up for dinner and drinks. It was great to see them again, and I hope that we get to cross paths again in Cambodia. Tomorrow I'm off on a three day tour of the Mekong Delta that finishes up in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and I can't wait!