Ho Chi Minh, March 4, 2026

Today we took a long trip to a preserved part of the Vietcong tunnel system ('Việt Nam Cộng-sản' or National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam). The route to the Cu Chi Tunnels partly follows a highway, but the traffic is so dense and especially the roads are overflowing with motorcycles, that it takes over 2 hours to cover the 100km.

The Vietcong tunnel system covered a total of several 1,000km and at this site, where it is maintained as a historical monument, several 100km. The Vietnamese are noticeably smaller than Europeans, making these tunnels very narrow for us, even the ones that have been slightly enlarged for visitors.

As a visitor, one can crawl through a section of the tunnels, which is quite impressive. You also get to see where they lived and cooked. How they misled the Americans, only making fires in the morning during fog and dispersing the smoke to different locations, setting traps that evidently worked. How they used captured materials: shoes were made from tires and tubes, unexploded cluster bombs were converted into mines and booby traps, metal from grenades was melted down, bomb craters were filled with excavated material from the tunnels so it didn't stand out. In the ventilation mounds, they buried clothes and tobacco from fallen American soldiers, so the sniffer dogs found nothing suspicious. In the tunnels, there were pods to block gas attacks... Overall, it is incredible how hard that was, how much energy the Vietcong invested, and with what ingenuity they faced the Americans.

However, a complete absurdity occurs today. Tourists can buy live ammunition at the end of the tour and shoot either with AK47s or machine guns. So when visiting the tunnels, you hear very loud gunfire from real weapons. In a place that shows the senselessness of war, the Vietnamese and tourists think of nothing better than shooting around.

After visiting the tunnels, we enjoyed an excellent Vietnamese lunch at a local restaurant on a side arm of the Saigon River. Afterwards, we headed back to the ship. The guide used the remaining time until departure to request the driver to take a city tour, allowing us to see the most important places in Ho Chi Minh once again.

In the evening, we then traveled down the Mekong and used that time to enjoy dinner on our balcony.