Last week, we visited the famous Cu Chi tunnels to the northeast of Saigon.

We did the tourist thing of squeezing through the warren of (enlarged) dank and claustrophobic tunnels that make the ground underneath Cu Chi resemble Swiss cheese. The overwhelming impression was of how hardcore the VC were. To build, maintain and defend over 200km of tunnels within 20 miles of Saigon, they must have been. The place was littered with bomb craters and horrific staged booby traps. Scattered about were tableaux of Cu Chi life complete with VC mannequins, which added the perfect note of Vietnamese surrealism to the scene.

Before being shown around, we were led to a small cinema in a bunker and shown an ancient propaganda film that presented life at Cu Chi as being something like band camp. This was less the frontier of a bitter war than a very nice village full of boy and girl scouts who thought it was really all rather fun signing up to die for the memory of their massacred relatives. My favourite bit, which is not in the clip below, shows the hospital. We see one band member patch up a tiny little cut on the arm of another one. You imagine that they then continue their game of tiddlywinks.

The enormous bomb craters suggested something a lot more gruesome, and more desperate.

I managed to find part of the old propaganda film on youtube.

Update: I found a bit more.

Now is Tet, the festival that inaugurates the lunar new year. 2010 is the year of the tiger, my absolute favourite endangered Asian animal…

Tet is all about flowers – Saigon is festooned with blossoms, and there are night markets devoted to the sale of gorgeous and wonderful growing things with which to decorate your home.

The prima ballerina of Tet flowers is Hoa Mai, the yellow blossom of a tree that is cultivated over the year outside Saigon, then brought into the city at the point of bursting into flower. I can them Tetmas trees.

Tet is like May Day, Christmas and New Years all at once. And for once, it is richly and deeply Vietnamese, not some cheesy copy of something seen on HBO.

With tigers!

Have a break. Have a guava.

What had attracted their attention was a stack of bass bins, bright lights, and three heavily made-up women in sequined mini-dresses who were gyrating wildly to a pop song about how fulfilled their lives had become since they bought a new washing machine. Or at least that’s what I assumed because of the stack of spotlit washing machines next to the bass bins and the people handing out brochures – and the fact that it was in front of a white goods store.

Old Vietnam
Later last night, I was awoken by the haunting screech of a cyclo vendor selling some sort of cake. Instead of ‘crying’ their wares, cyclo vendors play distorted tinny-sounding recordings that sound like the last, throttled gasp of a sunken u-boat… on a perpetual loop. This one was so awful-sounding that it pierced my sleep and for a minute I thought I was in Das Boot.