Cu Chi Tunnels: Tours & Tickets

Our tour was delivered by Vietnam Adventure Tours and our guide was "Duc" a young Vietnamese well-spoken English and humorous person. The bus was comfortable and our group of 20 or so fitted comfortably in the air-conditioned bus. It takes about two hours to travel from Ho Chi Minh to the tunnels and the pickup start from around 7.30AM. Its best to as this tour to book the smaller bus this mans you are taken through the site more easily. During the bus ride, old videos played about the Cu Chi Tunnel. At the site, your guide will purchase the tickets and you will make your way to the orientation map that explains visually the site the tunnels and the makeup of them, You will get an opportunity to see a model of the environment and created environment. The tunnels are 20,40,60 and 100 metres in total length and get more difficult as you progress there are escape exits at various points.

We were picked up at the hotel by Lan at 8 am and made it to the Cu Chi tunnels by 11.30 am after a rest break and a visit to a craft making site. Amazing workmanship and creativity by the disabled Vietnamese injured in the war. The Cu Chi tunnel experience was made very interesting through our informative guide Lan. He also had a wicked sense of humour and a humility when it came to explaining the war and it s atrocities from all sides. I would highly recommend the trip and the insight into just how horrid it would have been during the Vietnam war with such suffering for all - soldiers, children, mothers, families, dogs. Yes even the dogs had a roll to play in the war and suffered tremendously as in other world wars.

Tour guide was funny - you need thick skin though! Bring a change of clothes if you're doing the tunnel crawl. Only issues were the stops at the Lacker place - seems like a bit of a cash grab (same as coconut place, but that one was a bit cooler). The other thing was that the trip includes ~5+ hrs of driving and you don't drink booze in the limo as the picture would have you assume. However, the tours are really cool and the guide was hilarious!

Thankfully we booked the 10-20 group vs the 20 to 40 group. Otherwise we would have been fighting to hear our guide over the rest of the group. We ended up having about 10 and it was good. The only issue was that there were many other tours going on at the exact same time. So we did a bit of waiting for items to open up for us. All in all it was not too bad but it should be noted. Our guide hei was great at answering all of our questions.

Good points: the trip to the jungle to see the tunnels we thought was really great. However the very long bus trip to Mekong is felt worthless and pointless. Just half-day to cunnels is better. Tour guide was very helpful and informative.