The De-Militarised Zone Tour

Unsurprisingly, before booking, they didn't tell us that this was actually a rather long tour totalling some 360km through the old DMZ between North and South Vietnam. This basically meant spending almost the entire day in a bus with short stops to ease the pain and see a quick sight! Had I not been seated with the wheel arch at my feet and hence my toes only just below by bum I probably wouldn't still be so unimpressed with the whole journey!

The first sight was "The Rockpile" - a nearly sheer-sided 230m high mountain which the Americans used for observation - quite dramatic rising from the plains.

Stop 2 - Khe Sanh base which the American had to retreat from due to relentless bombardment. Some long-exposure photos in the museum showed the arcs of the incoming arillary from every directions imaginable - completely overwhelming the base. Generally there wasn't much to see in the DMZ as the Americans destroyed everything they could as they retreated and then the Vietnamese took the metal from everything they could to seel as scrap. This included the "McNamara Line" - America's coast-to border project to build an electric fence, planned to stop the North Vietnamese Army supplying the Viet Cong.

These supplies travelled along the Ho Chi Minh trails - names after the president in the North who wanted to reunite the country as a communist country. A bridge and road now run along the route of one of the old Ho Chi Minh trails. Whilst we were standing on the bridge there were a few kids fishing for what looked like bits of metal in the water below...whether it was waste from the bridge of still stuff left over from the war we've no idea. It could plausibly be either - there were quite a few groups out in the rice paddies with metal detectors searching for mines and metal...though we're told most mines are found when locals get limbs blown off, not by the people who go searching. Hence the stay-on-the-paths message which the guidebooks drill into you constantly!

During the war North and South battled over who had the biggest flagpole - boys will be boys! Only one remains but it is undoubtedly enormous. Nearby the stress of tanks can be seen on the old French bridge where each steel section is sags significantly in the middle.

By far the best part of the entire afternoon were the Vinh Moc Tunnels. Following instructions to the letter "Do not lose the person infront of you" Thomas (a guy we met from Denmark), Martin and I got rather sidetracked by all the tunnel entrances we were walking straight past and as I had a torch we somehow ended up going in! Whatever they say about health and safety (which is laughable here anyway), being in the dark tunnels and exploring them on your own gives you a brilliant impression of what it must have been like to use them during the war. These tunnels were much bigger that Chu Chi, allowing you to walk (albeit stooped). Obviously they were still very black and the flash blinding us when we took photos didn't help!

From one tunnel we popped out beside a beach, and from another we were projected into the back of an immovable, thorny cactus-bush. We then decided we should catch up with the others. We only missed reading the photo captions in the museum and I still got to pose with the antiaircraft gun so all was not lost!

Following the group through the tunnels (which we now thought we knew like the back of our hands) we took advantage of their slow progress to check out some of the darkened tunnels to either side. Great in all but one case when we realised we'd probably gone 600m down a tunnel with lots of twists, turns and junctions and should the torch go out it could get difficult to find our way back!

By the time we got back we'd completely lost the group though we knew where the seaboard entrance was so we headed there. Well almost - we came out by the sea, but from a different tunnel and at a different point. Ah well, we were out and from there we missioned it back over the hills, some guys farm and a dirt track to the bus!

Our next challenge was to try to distract ourselves for the 4 hours we had to wait for the Open Tour bus in Dong Que Restaurant, Dong Ha by playing guitar. Our challenge was short-lived though as the restaurant owner headed over with a dual-language magazine - so we ended up teaching him English using some text about the founding of Houston by two brothers. We were rewarded most kindly with tea and biscuits - clearly he'd read some stereotypical texts about what it is to be British!

We caught the nightbus up to Hanoi, this time with only a single Vietnamese-sized seat each and a bad air-con unit. Part way through the night I awoke thinking someone was singing. Somehow in my sleep I'd combined the mobile ringtone with the voice of the local guy who was now talking very loudly on the phone whilst everyone else trying to get some rest. He deserved a smacking!!

Gun's Don't Kill People - Bus-drivers do, you're a moped rider and I might kill you! We sing only the truth...bloody maniacs!