That may have been partially true, but that wasn't the whole story. Let me start from the beginning.
I woke up on Saturday morning, ready to go on another one of my weekend adventures. I decided to go on the Cao Dai Temples and Cu Chi Tunnels day trip - it came highly recommended by my Lonely Planet tour book. I bought the trip - only $7 - from the same tour company that I used when I went on my fantastic Mekong Delta Trip.
Our bus arrived an hour late, and after we got into the Vietnamese country side, (read: middle of no where) our bus engine died. Along with all the tourists, I got off the bus and found a restaurant to sit in and wait until our bus started back up. The bus was fixed within 15 minutes, and soon we were on our way again.
But not for long.
After about 10 minutes of driving, our bus pulled over and I heard a loud (and I mean loud) banging on our bus front door. All of a sudden, some Vietnamese guys jumped into the bus, and started screaming his head off at our driver. Our bus driver got out of the bus, and the action continued by the side of the road. Our tour group had no idea what was going on.
The person that pulled us over was absolutely livid. He was screaming uncontrollably and pointing at our driver. Cars, motorcycles and busses that were passing by stopped to watch the ensuing scene. (Side note: rubbernecking is practically the Vietnamese national pastime. I was once on a bus and we saw an accident - the bus driver stopped in the middle of the road so that the passengers could see the wreckage themselves.) In the meantime, I became friendly with a Vietnamese girl named Lucy, who explained to me what the heck was going on.
Apparently, soon after our pit stop to fix up our bus, the bus driver hit the enraged man's sister, wrecking her bike, and leaving her with some fairly serious injuries. Our bus driver drove away from the accident.
Lucy explained to me that this kind of stuff happens all the time in Vietnam - but usually more often in the North. The driver who causes the accident usually pays off the other driver so that they don't call the cops and then the two drivers go their separate ways. Our driver - from the North - was clearly doing his best to pay-off the enraged man.
As if we were blind, deaf and dumb, our tour guide got on the bus' microphone system and explained, "Our bus have technical difficulty... please be patient." While it was true that our bus had been having engine problems (it ended up breaking down 5 more times that day), it certainly wasn't true that the engine was causing the delay this time.
But our beloved tour guide was resourceful. He flagged down a small van and told us to gather our belongings - were were going in a "newer, better bus" to the Cao Dai Temples.
The "newer, better" bus had 15 seats - we had 29 passengers. This, of course, meant that I had some complete stranger sit on my lap. Diui, our tour guide, wasn't so lucky - he rode on the roof of the van.
We all got to the Temples in one piece, and just in time to catch the end of mass. Diui stayed outside of the Temple on his cell phone, which meant that we learned nothing about the Temples, or Cao Daiism. The temples were quite colorful and surprisingly modern, though I have to admit, they seemed to be a bit of a tourist trap.
Diui soon called our group over, and we were reunited with our original bus driver. It was 1:00pm, and Diui told us that it would be an hour and a half to the Cu Chi Tunnels. I pulled out a small pack of Oreo's and enjoyed the countryside.
But after two hours on the bus, I couldn't help but think that our bus driver was lost: we kept pulling U-turns and I started to recognize the huts and shacks that were by the road. After another hour and a half, Diui admitted to the bus: the driver had no clue where the tunnels were... he was illiterate, and he couldn't read the signs that led us to the Cu Chi tunnels.
This fact didn't help our opinion of the bus driver - but it did help our group unite against him. The Australians booed (loudly), the Brits tried to organize a mutiny (it failed) and the Frenchies hissed (and no, I'm not kidding). Our bus tour had gone from bad to worse, so Lucy got out and asked for directions.
As it turned out, we were never more than 25 minutes from the Tunnels. We did come close to the Cambodian border though - which would have added a new level of excitement to the trip.
The Cu Chi Tunnels were actually quite interesting. Diui warned us to follow him closely because there were booby traps and live artillery shells off the path. He showed us the entrances to the tunnels and we got to go into the tunnels to see how the Viet Cong lived during the war. The tunnels themselves were horribly small - about 2 feet or less from the roof to floor - which meant that I had to crawl through them on my stomach. A few of the tourists had panic attacks while were were trying to go through the tunnels.
After we got through the tunnel network (which took us a good half hour) Diui told us that of the 16,600 Viet Cong soldiers stationed there during the war, only 800 survived. Most died horrible deaths - the B-52 bombs that pummeled the area caused the tunnels to collapse, which buried most Viet Cong alive.
Our tour now over, my group got back onto the bus and headed home for Saigon. Almost every family complained on the bus home, and rightfully so: our tour had been completely mismanaged from start to finish. But even though we had our missteps along the way, and believe me, we had more "technical difficulties" than I've shared in this blog post - I believe our tour also showed us a side of Vietnam that few of us had seen before. However unfortunate our accidents were, they certainly told us more about the Vietnamese way of life than any museum, temple or park ever could... and for that, this tour may have been one of the better ones in my life.
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