Condom Jungles & Vinh Moc Tunnels at the DMZ

The overnight bus from Hanoi stopped at Hong La for a rest on its way to Hue. At the restaurant Hoa approached me to ask if I was interested in a tour of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Hue was 100km away. This would be the only real chance and, probably, the most time efficient way to see the DMZ. Two Irish girls were sleeping upstairs waiting for the tour to begin at 9:30am. I paid my US$15 and waited.
The girls were late. For some reason one of them, Louise, had to unpack all her crap and find a necklace to match her horrendous outfit. For God's sake, we were heading to Viet Cong tunnels, a cemetary and trudging through a field to a bunker! Why the effing hell do you need to wear a necklace?!

Necklace firmly secured around her neck, Louise headed straight to get on Hoa's motorbike. He wasn't having any of it. "You go with him. Gina you go with me." That was that.

Hoa was incredibly knowledgable. He had lived in Hong La his entire live and fought on the Southern Vietnamese side. He remembers the first American soldiers arriving in his town to set up a base. The first US warship docked at Hue in 1965. The northern front at the DMZ was heavily bombed and the jungle destroyed by Napalm between 1967 and 1969. After that year the front moved further south to Hue.

Today instead of jungle the landscape is dotted with rubber plantations which are now refered to as the Condom Jungles. We parked our motorbikes here and started walking along a path toward the Con Tien bunker. An American bunker with views of northern Vietnam. Sandbags from the sixties remain at the site.

A ditch along the path was dug two months ago. Looking at it you can't see anything but rocks and dirt. Looking closer you see the unexploded bombs throughout the ditch. The Mines Action Group (MAG) still works to disarm the unexploded ordanances here (and in Laos and Cambodia).

Our next stop was the cemetary where 10,632 Viet Cong are burried. The words "Lest we forget" in Vietnamese (of course) greeted us here. Some of the fighters were as young as 12 years old. The tomb stone identifies their name, their birth date, city of origin, when they joined the revolutionary fight and year of death. The stones are arranged by the region the fighters were from to make it easier for their families to find them. Apparently most of the fighters died of malaria in the jungles where they were initially burried. Their bones were exhumed and brought here after the war.

A tiny flask with a piece of paper hung around the neck acted as doc tags. Some tags were destroyed by water. We took a walk through the section of the cemetary where the unidentified Viet Cong are burried. Some of the nameless headstones have plagues placed upon them with photos and names. Fortune tellers are responsible for identifying the grave site of some of these soldiers. Families then create these plagues and place them over the grave stone of their loved ones... personally, I don't think it's a totally foolproof approach.

The Viet Cong built over 117 tunnels, 114 of them in northern Vietnam and the remainder in the south. The tunnels acted as shelter from the constant bombings. The Vinh Moc tunnels go three levels below ground and included kitchens, ventilation holes, family rooms, meeting rooms, a delivery room and storage rooms. The tunnels are on the coast and any smoke escaping through the ventilation when the kitchen was in use looked like mist from the sea. Seventeen babies were delivered in the tunnels. The site we visited had 13 well hidden entrances and exits. Last year a small section of the tunnel collapsed.

Inside, the five foot tall tunnel walls are muddy and wet. It's pitch black and whenever our guide walked too far ahead I couldn't even see my own feet, not to mention, the ground or ceiling of the tunnel. The coolest thing about this experience was that the four of us were the only people down below. None of the tour buses had arrived yet. The experience was eerie, yet really exciting...despite the annoying Irish girls' presence.

The route through the DMZ was dotted with bomb craters and villages. We drove along the famed Ho Chi Minh trail. Today the trail has been made into a major highway but smaller original trails remain. This trail (actually, there were numerous trails) were used by the Viet Cong to transport weapons and fighters from the north all the way to Saigon. All this happened on foot, through heavy jungle.

The two last stops were the old north/south divider, a footbridge built over the river. Not so very exciting. Then at Doc Mue, at the side of the road, an old abandoned US tank that had been stripped by villagers of most of its innards.

At 4pm I caught a ride back with a tour bus that had been doing a version of my tour. Everyone on the bus looked wiped. The tour for these poor guys started at 6am and it would be another 2 hours before we reached Hue.

I spent the following morning walking through the walled city of Hue. It was beautiful. The sky was overcast the entire day and it rained off and on but the gardens, moats and walls of the city were worth getting wet over. More pictures are on my flickr site.