Where Do These Tunnels Lead?

If you could call each day another "stop" on this month-long journey, then yesterday was perhaps my favorite stop so far. We had to be up bright and early for a long and bumpy bus ride to parts unknown. This was the first time we'd seen the more rural parts of Vietnam and it was an interesting change of pace. Erica pointed out to me a cemetery as we were driving along, and I noticed it was overgrown by weeds and what not. It seemed strange at first, but perhaps that's the way the people feel it should be here instead of neatly trimmed green patches with spots of burnt yellow like we're used to in the states. I appreciate how the people here try to more organically live with nature, even though there's plenty of times they don't succeed. We're very used to fighting with nature back home, that we forget what natural can look like.

Anyway, we first stopped at Cao Dai temple, a temple that helped establish a Vietnamese religion that combines aspects of Buddhism, Christianity, Taoism, etc. It may not be the biggest religious site, but every time I took a step down the marble floors, it felt like a massive step. The place has presence. I did my best to step quietly and not be intrusive to the local worshippers, even though I couldn't stop marveling at the whole thing.

Here's a shot of Anh, the lovely SEAMEO staff member who accompanied us along the trip Sunday. Unlike many places we've been to, this temple had plenty of space all to itself showing how important it was to the townspeople.

We had lunch inside a good little place off the main road and with my seventy-five cent beer, life was good.

The best stop for me however came in the afternoon at the Cu Chi Tunnels, essentially a jungle/forest that has been restored to life after being a prime war zone in the Vietnam War. The idea of the place was far from wonderful, especially after our little walkthrough started with an almost comical piece of war prop. that went long and mentioned the "American enemies" too many times. Imagine watching that, then taking a few steps down the path to see all the technology-less ways Americans slipped into deadly traps. It made me uneasy, but I feel that the people are preserving this type of history because they know they should for memory, not to alienate. As our tour guide said the day before, the Vietnamese are looking to the future, not the past.

The place itself was an awesome little adventure however. We took a brisk walk along the trail spotted by little exhibits about how the people lived, how they worked, etc. The actual trek through the tunnels which I had to frog-walk through, was frightening but worth experiencing. I cannot imagine how some of the guerrilla fighters did it for twenty years. Unfortunately the few pictures I took at Cu Chi came out blurry, but hopefully the rest of the group has some good ones. For now, here's a shot of our hometown hero Vanessa crawling out one of the camouflaged hideouts:

I'm hoping we'll get to see more sites submerged in a more natural environment as we had with Cu Chi. In more businessy news, I think I'm definitely hitting my groove with the teaching part of this expedition. It's been important for me to realize that the teaching isn't just the 55 or so minutes in the classroom. It's their dinner or their ride home the same day where they think they had a good day and remember just even a few things from that morning's lesson.