Updated by: May 11, 2026
The Cu Chi Tunnels
Some travel memories stay with you for the wrong reasons. This one has stayed with me for the right ones.
My wife — my girlfriend at the time — and I won a free trip to Vietnam with Intrepid Travel when we were younger. North to south, twenty or so travelers, the kind of trip that bonds strangers into friends over the course of two weeks. The tour guide called us sticky rice, as we needed to stick together.
When we reached the Cu Chi Tunnels outside Ho Chi Minh City, our guide offered us the chance to do what tourists have been doing there for years — climb down through the original manhole entrance used by Viet Cong fighters during the war. A narrow, unforgiving hole in the ground designed for people considerably smaller than most Westerners.
One by one we tried. Most of us squeezed through with varying degrees of dignity. Some gave up halfway. It’s tighter than you think and darker than you expect.
Then a girl in our group — larger than the rest of us — put her hand up to try.
We all looked at each other. We looked at the hole. We looked at her. The mathematics did not seem to add up.
She didn’t want to hear it.
In she went. And in she stayed — wedged firmly in the entrance to a Viet Cong tunnel, requiring the combined effort of several fellow travelers and at least one very patient Vietnamese guide to extract.
She came out laughing. Which, in hindsight, is exactly the right response.
The Cu Chi Tunnels are one of the most sobering places in Vietnam — a reminder of extraordinary human resilience and the brutal reality of war. But travel, if you’re lucky, also gives you moments of pure unscripted human comedy.
That girl knew exactly what she was doing. She just wanted the experience. She didn’t care what we thought.
There’s something admirable in that.
Paul Mercuri
Wake Up Here Founder
