The Cu Chi tunnels, and which of the two sites to pick

The tunnels are the one war site most visitors to Ho Chi Minh City put on the list. The visit is decided before you leave the city. Two places sell tickets to the same network, an hour apart, and they are not the same experience.

What is actually down there?

The Cu Chi tunnels are a hand-dug network northwest of Saigon, built over roughly two decades and used through the war against the United States. Accounts put the system at about 250 km at its peak, on three levels, with kitchens, workshops, sleeping quarters and field hospitals underground.

The district sat inside what the American command treated as a free-fire zone, and the tunnels are why the area held out. Much of the surrounding forest is regrowth over ground that was bombed, sprayed and cleared.

What a visitor sees today is a managed site. Preserved and reconstructed sections, display bunkers, trap exhibits, and one stretch of tunnel widened enough for a tourist to get through. The war sites guide sets this one against the museums in the city and the DMZ further north.

Which of the two sites should you pick?

Ben Duoc if you have the time, Ben Dinh if you do not. Both belong to the same network and sell the same visit, and the crowd is the difference.

Ben Dinh is the default because it is nearer and every city tour sells it. That is also its problem: the entrances queue from mid-morning and the guided loop moves in a column.

Ben Duoc takes another half hour of road and repays it. The site is quieter and the tunnel sections are less enlarged. The memorial temple on the grounds carries the names of tens of thousands of dead from the district and the provinces around it.

How do you get there?

A half-day group tour out of Ho Chi Minh City is how most people go, and it runs 250,000 to 500,000 dong with transport and a guide. Morning departures leave around eight and return by lunch.

Public transport works and costs almost nothing. Take bus 13 from the city to Cu Chi bus station, then the local connection onward, which is the 79 for Ben Duoc. The whole trip costs well under 50,000 dong and takes about two hours each way.

A private car runs 1.2 to 1.8 million dong for the day and is worth splitting between four. River speedboats also sell the trip at several times that price, arriving in about ninety minutes. The day trips page puts all of this against the delta and the Cao Dai temple.

What does the visit cost?

Entry is 110,000 dong a person at Ben Dinh and 90,000 at Ben Duoc, and both figures have moved more than once in recent years. Check at the gate rather than budgeting to the dong.

A guide is included with a tour and optional otherwise. Going in without one is fine at Ben Duoc, where the displays carry signage. It works less well at Ben Dinh, where the circuit follows a guided walk.

The extras add up if you let them. The range sells rounds by the ten, and ten of them cost more than the ticket. Worth knowing before somebody in the group suggests it.

What happens on the circuit?

A visit runs about two hours in a fixed sequence. An introductory film, display bunkers, a set of trap exhibits, a tunnel section to crawl, a bomb crater, and tea with steamed tapioca at the end.

The trap displays are explicit: spike pits, swinging boards, a mounted set of the tyre sandals the fighters wore. The film is a period propaganda piece, and the site presents it as one rather than as narration.

The tapioca stop is the closing act. Boiled cassava with peanut and sesame salt was what the tunnels fed people, and it is handed round with tea before you leave.

What is the crawl like?

The open tunnel sections are hot and low, lit by bulbs at intervals, and wider than the originals. Most people cover twenty to forty metres of them and come out at the first exit, which the site expects.

Anybody uneasy in tight spaces should treat the first exit as the plan rather than the failure. The sections run in stages precisely so that visitors can stop.

Wear something you do not mind ruining and leave the bag with somebody above ground. The tunnels are red dirt and the knees of a pair of trousers do not survive the crawl clean.

What else is worth knowing before you go?

Arrive early. The gates open at 7am, ticket sales stop at 4pm, and the city coaches land between nine and ten. At Ben Dinh, eight o'clock is a walk and ten o'clock is a queue.

The shooting range is audible across both sites from mid-morning. That is a fact of the visit rather than an optional part of it. Anybody who would rather not hear automatic fire while reading an exhibit should go early, or choose Ben Duoc.

Go in the dry season if the trip allows, between December and April. The tunnels are worse in the wet months the typhoon season guide covers, and everything above ground is open air.