TUESDAY 2 AUGUST 2011
I was collected at my hotel at 8.15 for a day trip to The Cao Dai Temple at Tay Ninh, about 100 kilometres from Saigon, and the Cu Chi Tunnels. During the journey, the guide pointed out the crossroads where the photo of the little girl burnt by napalm had been taken.
The Cao Dai religion is a mixture of Christianity, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. The temple was extremely ornate and Graham Greene described it as a “Walt Disney fantasia of the East, dragons and snakes in technicolour”. The religion was founded in the mid 1920s and has about 2,000,000 followers in Vietnam. They have various saints, including Victor Hugo, Joan of Arc, William Shakespeare, Napoleon Bonaparte, Lenin, Winston Churchill and Louis Pasteur.
We then drove to the Cu Chi Tunnels where Vietnamese villagers had dug a warren of tunnels stretching over 200 kilometres to escape the American bombing. There are two sets of tunnels at Cu Chi, and we visited the southern ones which were only used for fighting. We were shown the various forms of spiked booby traps, and were able to go through some of the tunnels which are tiny and quite claustrophobic, even though they have been widened for Western visitors! The ones in the north were larger as they were used for living in. People were also given the opportunity of firing weapons, such as the AK47.
We then drove to the Cu Chi Tunnels where Vietnamese villagers had dug a warren of tunnels stretching over 200 kilometres to escape the American bombing. There are two sets of tunnels at Cu Chi, and we visited the southern ones which were only used for fighting. We were shown the various forms of spiked booby traps, and were able to go through some of the tunnels which are tiny and quite claustrophobic, even though they have been widened for Western visitors! The ones in the north were larger as they were used for living in. People were also given the opportunity of firing weapons, such as the AK47.
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| One of the many booby traps |
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| Cao Dai Temple |
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| Cao Dai Temple |
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