We got up and left the hotel. It was an uneventful morning. Got back on the Ho Chi Minh road and traveled southeast toward the coast. We eventually had to get on Highway 1 which links Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. This road is traveled by lots of trucks and I was not looking forward to getting on it. As it turned out it wasn’t that busy and we only needed to go around 50 miles on it before we turned off. I passed many trucks on the right side of the road using the 3-foot motorbike lane which was different. The good news was the trucks were only going 50 miles per hour so you didn’t get tossed around by the wind. It was still nerve racking!
There were many larger corn fields on this trek. Some of the corn was tasseled and some was 6 inches tall. They grow 3 crops in one year due to the warm weather. All of a sudden I smelled a hog confinement building. (Are we in Iowa)? Then we come upon a triple-decker semi hauling hogs. For the record, they smell the same in Vietnam as in Iowa.
We pulled into the Vinh Mac tunnel museum. So I watched a short video then got to go down into the tunnels. They have 3 levels – the deepest being 23 meters in the ground. Vietnam has around 114 tunnels that run 1,700 kilometers which is the distance between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. In this set of tunnels, the Vietnamese removed 6,000 cubic meters of red clay – all by hand – 1 bucket at a time. From 1966 – 1972, many people lived in the tunnels. They had babies in them, had social events and even weddings. They would come out at night like rats and collect the dead fish from the sea that were floating on top from all the bombing. They would also farm so they had food to eat. Since our guide lived in this village during the war she told the story of how one of the drill like bombs drilled into the earth and exploded killing 61 people in the tunnel. So they decided to dig deeper thus the 23 meters. There were 80 steps going down at one point. She said that during the war the US dropped 700,000 lbs of bombs on Vietnam. They also had 91,000 bomb shelters! These were made out of bamboo.
We left the tunnels and ran the bikes onto the beach which was great fun until we both got stuck in the sand. I have never ridden a bike on the beach. We the help of a laughing local – we got pushed out and back onto the road.
After around 120 miles we arrived in Hue. This place is like the Light & Power District in KC with music and bars everywhere. We had a nice dinner and walked around to check out the sites. Then lights out!
Doug's Travels 