Cao Dai and Cu Chi

**please note all pictures are clickable for a larger format**

On Saturday we did some more touristing.  We took a guided tour from Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) to the Cao Dai temple and then to the Cu Chi tunnels. It was an all day affair: we left the house around 7:20 in the morning and returned around 8:30 in the evening, after dinner downtown at an Irish Pub.

Cao Dai is a religion founded about a hundred years ago in the Vietnamese city of Tay Ninh.  It has around 2 million followers, or about 2% of the population. It's a bit like the American Unitarian Universalist Association in that it draws from Taoism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Confucianism, and regards a number of people, including Victor Hugo and Jesus, as holy prophets. It does have a Pope, however, and a strict religious hierarchy with closely followed religious rights. Its practitioners wear all white and its symbol is the eye. The main temple, or the Holy See, of Cao Dai is located in Tay Ninh, and is a tourist attraction.

We left our house around 7:20 and caught a cab into the center city to the offices of the travel agent we used for our tour. We waited there from 8:45 to 9:00 to be shuttled to the central bus station. There we waited another 15 or 20 minutes for our tour guide to arrive and take us in our van to Tay Ninh. There were seven other tour participants: two middle aged Israeli men, a Romanian women in her late twenties who is a project manager in a factory for Proctor and Gamble, and four British boys who had recently graduated from university. The Israeli men had matching blue nike sneakers and had a lot of trouble understanding our Vietnamese tour guide's heavily accented English. The British boys were loud, rowdy, and disorganized.

It took about three hours to travel the 55 miles from HCMC to Tay Ninh. It took almost half of that time to get outside the city limits. A city whose streets were paved for bicycles and motorbikes does not easily accommodate passenger vans.  We also stopped for about 15 minutes at a handicrafts store somewhere in the countryside selling all manner of wooden items inlaid with mother of pearl, sea shells, and eggshells.

We reached the temple around 11:30 in the morning; enough time to see a bit of the grounds and the temple before noon prayer began. The grounds have several wooded areas reserved for monkeys, although they seemed mostly to be up in the trees as we only saw three or four. 

The temple itself is situated at the head of a large lawn with an obelisk, and no one is allowed to cross between the obelisk and the temple during services. Prayer services are four times a day: 6am, noon, 6pm, and midnight. They involve some singing and music on the part of the choir in the choir loft - which is where tourists are allowed to spectate from, and a lot of sitting and bowing on the part of the participants on the main floor. Services last until the leaders feel their god is satisfied. We stayed for about 15 minutes. Then we went to lunch.

Left: the alter area, Right: devotees during the worship service

Lunch was at a local place and was typical Vietnamese fare: corn soup, rice, ginger chicken, fried spring rolls, pork on a stick, and watermelon for desert. We had pre-paid our lunch, as had the Romanian woman, so we sat with her while the other six were at a different table.  She had been volunteering at a school in Cambodia, and then visiting an elephant refuge in Thailand with a group of other Romanians and had decided to spend a couple extra days in Vietnam on her own.

From lunch we left for Cu Chi, which is 30 miles back towards HCMC and takes about an hour. The country roads are mostly paved, but you have to slow down and pull over to the side of the road when another car or truck is approaching because the road isn't quite wide enough. Generally the scenery is orchards and forests of rubber trees. The roads are very bumpy and the very tall British boys in the back had their heads bounced into the ceiling on more than one occasion. Perhaps it's why they were disorganized.

The Cu Chi tunnels are a spider web of approximately 150 miles of tunnels and underground rooms used by the Viet Cong to combat American military troops in Vietnam. The tunnels generally measure about two feet in diameter and include larger dugouts for eating, meeting, sleeping, weapons storage and manufacture, and hospitals. Varrying in depth from 1 to 6 meters underground the tunnels served as both hiding places during American bombardments and underground thoroughfares through the jungle for Viet Cong guerrilla fighters. Some parts of the tunnels have been turned into a historical park open to visitors which also features American tanks and munitions and life size dioramas of Viet Cong life. Exhibits include weapons manufacture, guerrilla traps, and food manufacture.

Left: a traditional booby trap with bamboo spikes at the bottom. Center: Kim demonstrates the method of camouflaging the tunnel entrances. Right: The entrance to the "tourist" area of the tunnels. 

It was certainly interesting to see the tunnels, and even the ones broadened to three feet in diameter for tourists made me claustrophobic. We only crawled through them for 20 meters - the tourist route stretched a full 120m! However, our reaction in general to the park was similar to our experience at the war remnants museum - doubly unpleasant. Not only because of the heat and mosquitos, but also because it is never pleasant to come face to face with a gruesome period in American military history while the other side is shown through rose tinted glasses. There is almost no mention of the South Vietnamese government anywhere. The conflict is referred to as the "American war". I'm sure it is a conflict we will have to continue to grapple with in our time here - especially if we visit any more museums or historical sights.

After Cu Chi we spent another 90 minutes or so in the van headed back to HCMC. We were dropped off downtown by the central market. Since we were already in the city we decided to go to an Irish Pub we had found online for Chris' early birthday dinner. It was nice to have something other than rice for a meal!

Thanks for reading!

-Chris and Kim

Stay tuned for more tails from the other side of the world!

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