Ugh I hate early starts – bus pick up was at 8am. Free breakfast first of baguette with scrambled egg – I love free so I’ll take it! I felt smug about being awake as I noticed a taxi was waiting outside for ages, and at 8am some drunk Aussie guy half fell down the stairs and ran for the taxi. Turns out he massively overslept, his taxi was booked for 7am as his flight back to Oz was at 10am and it takes an hour to get to the airport…! Good luck to him I guess?!

Crappy little minibus came to get me, but got a seat with plenty of leg room so was feeling quite lucky! And then the bus stopped, at a bus station – we had to transfer buses to an even crappier one where half the seats were so far back it was proper “easy rider” style and the other ones were so far forward even an osteopath would think that was too severe! Crammed in this tiny bus whose aircon was severely limited, we started off on the journey. The “English speaking tour guide” spoke limited English and so sort of would just say a few words and leave us to our own devices. It turned out though the reason he was particularly reticent to speak was quite interesting…!

The bus drove for 3 hours to get us to Tay Ninh in time for the Cao Dai adherents’ midday prayer. The religion was started in the 1920s, the worshippers dress in white robes while the priests wear either yellow, blue or red representing different facets of the religion, Buddhism, Taoism or Confucianism. As well as combining these three faiths, Cao Dai also combined them with Christianity and Islam. It teaches that many important figures from these faiths are saints, as well as Victor Hugo (author of Les Miserables!), Sun Yat-Sen (father of China), Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc… All in all, it’s very eclectic, and the prayer summed that up!

As the faithful processed in, segregated by gender, and all singing prayers, the band played what I guess was meant to be music, but just sounded like a discordent cacophony of noise, completely unrelated to everything happening on the level below. From time to time the worshippers would kneel, stand, bow, all in unison. Tourists were allowed to observe from a balcony but could only enter through certain doors and could not walk on certain areas of pavement. The building was a psychedelic nightmare, like the decorators couldn’t decide on a theme or colour scheme so instead used seemingly every single form of religious iconography they could find, all at once!

After the prayer finished, the bus waited for us to take us to the Cu Chi tunnels. Unlike the Cao Dai temple which dates from during the French colonisation of Vietnam, the Cu Chi tunnels are from the Vietnam war and were used by the Vietcong as a way to avoid the US soldiers. The tunnels stretch across a massive area, and were used to cache weapons, live, travel underground, and give the Viet Cong the advantage during guerilla warfare. The US tried to root out the Viet Cong but were unable to as the tunnels were so complex, deep below ground, and also some were so narrow that they were unpassable for westerners. Many tunnels were rigged with lethal traps, trapdoors were hidden with foliage so as to be indistinguishable from the forest floor. Combined with the humidity and malaria, it was an inhospitable place for the US forces and the Viet Cong alike.

Original tunnels are all over the area however as Westerners cannot fit inside them(!) for tourism purposes, the Vietnamese have built replica tunnels and in part expanded some original tunnels to allow foreigners to explore them and get a feeling as to how oppressive they were. Our guide was very reticent to explain the traps and tunnels, so I asked him about his war experience (he was in his 70s) – he had actually fought for the Saigon army with the Americans against the Viet Cong. After the US evacuated their embassy, these soldiers were left behind so he fled to the countryside, killing any communists he encountered on the way, and then stayed there for several years until relative normality resumed. He was bitter towards the Americans but hated the Communists even now, so unlike the other guides we passed, he didn’t go into great patriotic detail about the gruesome traps the “Viet Cong bravely set to destroy the capitalist invaders” so pros and cons I guess!

I went into one of the tunnels and you had to squat and shuffle which is good for your calf muscles! Very narrow, would not have wanted to spend long down here in the heat and the dark. The tunnel staff took us to watch a dreadful video probably made in the late 70s filled with pro-Communist anti-American rhetoric. They then took us to a firing range where they still had loads of American weapons from the war, and you could have a go – so obviously I did! Had a go on a machine gun and a M-30. The recoil from the M-30 was big but the heat from the machine gun…mood grief! The tank machine gun was ridiculous.

It then began to rain as we boarded the bus back to Saigon. Went for pho (mmmm I do love broth), with a train at 8am the following day another early night required!