Inside Vietnam's extraordinary Cu Chi military tunnels

Kanika Datta visits an extraordinary underground military base in south Vietnam

Crawling through the suffocating damp brown clay of a dimly-lit tunnel with just enough space for your torso is not the stuff of a standard vacation. But then, recreation must have been the last thing on the minds of the thousands of Vietnamese who dug the tunnels at Cu Chi. 

This extraordinary network of tunnels is testimony to a plucky little country’s 30-year war of resistance against, first, French colonisers and, then, the US. 

Cu Chi was the centre of the ingenious guerrilla resistance in the heart of enemy territory. At its height in the late 1960s, this improvised complex, built without