The Korean Peninsula Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)

There are many companies that offer tours of the DMZ - the four kilometer thick demilitarized zone that is the de facto border between the People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) - but all of them operate through the US army. This is because the 'demilitarized' zone is actually the most militarized border in the world, and visits are taken exceedingly seriously.

If you look closely, you can see a North Korean soldier in front of the building's doors.

I - like all the tourists - treated the soldiers with extra cultural sensitivity and respect since we were at the most tense location in the country. Yep, that's definitely what we did. 

The soldiers all stood at perfect attention without moving. It honestly didn't seem like the best defense, but since the war is on indefinite ceasefire, I guess standing still like an easy target doesn't really matter.

The microphones down the center of this table are the official line between North Korea and South Korea at this point. That way, they can both negotiate from within their borders.

The grounds were meant to host peace summits, but North Korea didn't want to have talks somewhere built by the South and on their side of the Joint Security Area.

In the distance we could see a propaganda city, that among other things has an enormous flag pole in order to hoist a giant North Korean flag. I though this was all quite petty, and it seemed like our American soldier tour guide thought so too, until he bragged that the South Korean side build a bigger flag in response, in their own propaganda city. Sigh.

The Bridge of No Return was used for prisoner exchanges at the end of active hostilities. The bridge is most famous as the site of the Axe Murder Incident because of the murder of two U.S. Army officers who had been cutting down a 100 foot poplar tree that had been blocking a United Nations Command checkpoint's line of sight to the bridge. After the incident the bridge was no longer used. I most strongly associate it with the book I read by Simon Winchester about walking the entire length of South Korea. North Korea suggested he walk the rest of the peninsula, and he was tempted, though the U.S. military would probably not have actually permitted it. Thus, this bridge was the end of his journey.

There were soldiers performing drills within sight of the gift shop (which I didn't really want to go into because what is technically still an active war zone doesn't strike me as the place for kitschy souvenirs).

The next stop was a tour of a tunnel under the border. The tunnel was one of several discovered that North Korea had dug under the DMZ, in order to have the option of a quick surprise invasion that bypassed the well monitored and defended border. North Korea ludicrously claimed that the tunnel was dug by the South, despite the fact that the blasting pattern shows it was clearly dug from the North. The North then claimed that the tunnel was for mining coal, even though the geology is completely wrong for coal to be present.

The tunnel pretty much just looked like any other blasted out tunnel, and only its implications made it an interesting stop. That, and the weird, inappropriately theme park like decorations:

One piece of art there that I did like was of people working together to put together two half spheres, the faces of which were imprinted with one of the disputed countries in relief and the other in imprint, so that they would fit together perfectly. 

Next we went to a viewing platform to look into North Korea and to see a wide span of the DMZ. It was really just a long razor wire fence and some countryside. Landmines are hard to see. We weren't allowed to take pictures of the border for security reasons, so here's a picture of people looking at the border. 

And yet, for all that security, you can just hop on a train and ride out to Pyeongyang!

Okay, to be fair South Koreans cannot do so, and there is far too much security screening and passport inspection to say we just 'hopped on'.

Tune in next time for my surreal adventures in North Korea. 

...

Just kidding. There actually used to be tours of North Korea out of South Korea, and I have close friends who were able to go see the gorgeous Diamond Mountains. However, an older South Korean woman on one of the tours decided to go harvest herbs in a restricted area at three in the morning and the North Korean soldiers killed her, so they don't give tours anymore. I missed out by a few months, though I'm glad I wasn't on the tour with that incident. 

The fact that there are no longer tours to North Korea didn't prevent me from convincing a particularly gullible coworker that we had in fact crossed the border. She asked if the tour was going into North Korea, and I didn't miss a beat in telling her that we already were there. The soldiers out the window happened to be facing such that the South Korean flag patch was on the arm aimed away from us, and had on black armbands, so I claimed that they were North Korean soldiers. My coworker excitedly got out her camera to take pictures, and her camera was malfunctioning such that she thought all of her pictures were blank. I thus naturally told her that we must have passed through a strong electromagnet that erased all memory from electronic devices, set up by the North Koreans to prevent information from leaking about the country. I think that's about the point when my other coworkers on the tour couldn't help but break out laughing. We were actually at the train station pictured above. It was rather sad to see the beautiful rail system that lead from the southern tip of the peninsula and that extended all the way to Great Briton was blocked because of North Korea's anti-social behavior. We could get our passports stamped with an entry to North Korea here, but I thought it foolish to complicate future border crossings trying to explain that the stamp was official but not actually an indication that I had set foot in the rogue state.