This morning we hopped on a bus headed for Cu Chi tunnels with some new found friends from France and Mexico who we met during breakfast at the hostel. The bus trip was about an hour and a half each way. The tunnels were interesting; an extremely complex system of underground passageways allowing for the Victor Charlie to maneuver here and there right under the noses of the South Vietnamese or the American troops, undetected. Clever little rascals. But I won’t write much about the tunnels because our tour guide will be more interesting for you. The guy’s name is Bean (at least phonetically), and he talked just about incessantly, editorializing freely and repeating himself quite a bit. At one point he said not to ask us about his experience fighting in the war because it is too painful to remember and he wants to forget, but then he proceded to tell us (without our prompting) more than we could have ever wanted to know. He told us the story in pieces, so I’ll do my best here for you. The story goes that he fought for the South alongside American troops as a member of the Navy. He was an officer on a ship and American troops saluted him, he said. Later the story had him in the Coast Guard, where he flew the helicopter and then somehow also managed to be the guy at the door yelling “Go! Go! Go!” as troops parachuted out. He was not on the ground, he told us, so he never went near the tunnels. Later in the tour, however, he told us of leading reconnaisance missions deep into the jungle to find dead American soldiers so their bodies could be sent home. He would have a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other, and he showed us how he would yell, “Billy, go that way!” and “John, over here!” At one point he claims to have worked for John Kerry while he lived in New York, though he moved back to Vietnam because he couldn’t stand American food. He was sure to let us know that his dad was an ambassador to the United Nations. Tour Guide Bean loves his country, but he hates his job. He will retire next year, at which point he plans to sit in his hammock and finish the book he is writing. He told us the title and encouraged us to be on the lookout for it in Australia and Europe and America, and wherever we were from.

Upon returning from the bus trip Jon and I went looking for one of the things in HCMC that we missed from the walking tour yesterday: the Jade Emperor Pagoda. We wandered for an hour or more in pursuit of the place but in the end, the search proved futile. At one point I told Jon I found it, but what I saw turned out to be the Prudential Insurance building.