Today I stepped over the line dividing North from South, and while Those Red Commies were thin on the ground, I did get to drool with Jacquelyne over a six-and-a-half-foot square-jawed American Patriot. Oh, those stereotypes - make life so much easier!
We left EV in the morning to get the bus down to Seoul, where we exited the subway into a hotel the likes of which my tatty little eyes have never before seen. There was an entire floor of jewellery stores where the window displays included CCTV cameras the size of a large cat, focused on the precious goods, and the chairs artistically scattered in the enormous lobby were flanked by great palm trees. It wasn't even one of those hotels trying to blind you into thinking they were tucking up Brad Pitt in their main suite that night. It was one of those that really doesn't need the bling to make you understand that this is a place you do not belong unless you're only in Seoul to buy your daughter her own jet because the family one is getting a little small.
The agency on the 3rd floor took all our passports and photocopied them for their files. We had already supplied the details a week earlier so they could be passed to the South Korean and US armies for approval. The woman at the desk quickly checked that we had all conformed to the intense dress code, and then we were off on a bus out of Seoul and into the north. The first stop was lunch, and I laughed and said wouldn't it be funny if they took us to English Village, which we would pass on the highway. Actually it wasn't English Village, but a buffet place at the bottom of our hill. Look who's laughing now. After showing everyone else our Hollywood-style sign up on the hill, we were off again, following the highway that runs alongside the Han River. Just a few metres after rejoining the highway from the Paju turnoff, the Han met the Imjin, and the view over the river, like political magic, became North Korea.
We first visited Imjingak Station which is the furthest that South Koreans are able to go. Cait and I were both horrified at the extent to which South Korea has taken a place of great sadness where elderly women go to leave tributes to the spirits living in their hometowns, so far away in the north, and turned it into, well, an amusement park, complete with loud muzak and tacky souvenir stalls.
We were able to overlook Freedom Bridge which was destroyed in the Korean War and rebuilt to carry thousands of prisoners of war back to their respective sides after the ceasefire. In the photo on you can see a wooden bridge which takes South Koreans to a barbed wire fence on which they pin colourful ribbons asking for information on lost family members, and prayers for hometowns and for peace.
Back on the bus, we continued down the Freedom Highway (!) to the first military checkpoint, at the gates to Camp Bonifas (named for a victim of the Axe Murder Incident.) Driving past the World's Most Dangerous Golf Course, a one-hole course surrounded by a minefield, we were offloaded into a hall where a short presentation raced us through the Korean War and its aftermath, and told us the rules of this rather surreal tour. Listen to the soldiers; walk in two strict lines; don't point; don't react to North Korean soldiers; don't look anyone in the eye; don't touch any equipment; only take photos when told to. Many of the rules were obvious - pointing might look like a gun - or at least enough like one for the KPA (the North Korean Army) to react. Others, like not wearing slops or torn jeans were a bit more obscure. A friend joked that slops were banned because the sound of them slapping on the steps imitates gunfire, which isn't great in this edgy environment. Apparently, though, it's because in the past the KPA used photos of sloppy tourists as propaganda to prove to the North Korean people that South Koreans and westerners were desperately poor - not realising that these days, the more rips your designer jeans have in them, the more money you paid for them...
Exiting the building we were loaded onto official JSA buses for the short journey to the southern demarcation line where we passed checkpoints overlooking three 10-foot fences topped with barbed wire and alarms, enclosing a 100 metre strip of dead land loaded with landmines. A long stride from the first days, our army escort told us, when sticks pushed into the ground were attached by wires to tin cans filled with pebbles to warn patrols of incursions.
The landscape was overgrown and lush, giving way occasionally to rice paddies. There are two villages within the Demilitarized Zone, maintained to enable a smooth return to peace should war ever be over. Each side has one village, and the farmers grow the best (and most expensive) rice and ginseng in Korea, the taste improved by the fact that there is no pollution to corrupt the crops. Benefits of living there include vastly inflated prices for crops, and no taxes. Then again, farmers move in pairs so that if there is an attack - and these are common, even extending to kidnappings - one can escape and warn soldiers. Villagers are under strict curfew, and the only reason they generally leave is for children to attend school in nearby Munsan (the nearest large town to the DMZ). They must be in their homes for 250 days a year to maintain residency. Not a home I'd personally feel at home in!
Another unexpected benefit of the Zone is the proliferation of birds and animals, living peacefully and undisturbed by the massive development in other parts of Korea. One of my friends and I were excited to see what we think was a
Red-Crowned Crane, but sadly no Asiatic Black Bears or Siberian Tigers.
We soon came to the JSA - Joint Security Area - a small collection of buildings on the central demarcation line. One side is North Korean (grey buildings), the other South Korean and UN (blue buildings). We were taken to a small traditional pavilion from where we could see and take photos of the North Korean administrative building, Panmunjak. Here I proved myself incapable of not pointing, although I did get a gruff "Ma'am, please do not point." from the 6-foot Patriot, which was cool. Pointing once was silly. Pointing twice, however, had me exiling myself voluntarily from the edge of the pavilion and sitting on my hands in the stairwell. This decision was helped along by the North Korean watching us through binoculars.
You can just see the guard in the photo above, but when you look at the zoomed-in photo below, you can see the second pair of binoculars in the window. No matter your thoughts on Western propaganda, and Stalinist dictators (or vice versa), it's creepy.
From the pavilion we also looked down on the blue buildings that serve as meeting places for the two sides. The South Korean soldiers standing at the end of the buildings in the picture below are facing the North Korean side. The one on the right is half protected by the edge of the building - this is so that he can get out of the line of fire if the one in the centre is shot down. Notice their stance with fists curled at their sides - this is the Ready Position for Taekwondo, which every soldier has to become expert in.
From the pavilion we descended through the deserted visitors' centre to the equally deserted central quad, containing 5 long huts stretching between the sides. We entered Building No. 3, the main building where all talks take place. Inside, two South Koreans stood guard. Translation booths at each end overlooked a well-polished table down the centre of which microphones marked the official border between North and South. A UN flag was set on the table. Other flags too once stood here, including South Africa, remnants of past peace talks, until a North Korean guard leapt onto the table and wiped his bare feet with the American flag. Since then, the flags have been relegated to a glass frame over the South Korean translation booth.
The two South Korean soldiers stand in a constant state of readiness when there are civilians present. Wearing aviators, helmets and uniform, the clenched fists give them an air of menace - more so when the more you try to make them laugh or even twitch the more they resemble wax statues. We couldn't resist taking photos with them, silly as I felt standing next to a breathing statue (although the breathing part is questionable.) Both soldiers were giants for Koreans, and our American Patriot explained to us that the North Koreans used to use such well-respected military tactics as sneaking into the building before meetings to lower the chairs of the other side, so that they could look down on their ideological opponents, and wearing high heeled shoes. So it became US policy to only use soldiers 6 foot and taller within the JSA... The Koreans cannot possibly compete - in fact, as the Patriot told us with a grin, even the chair-lowering didn't make them taller than the Americans. Now that control of the JSA has been handed over to the South Korean army (only 5% of soldiers inside the DMZ are American) soldiers are still specifically chosen for their height, while shorter soldiers are assigned to fence cleaning duties...
Back on the bus, we drove up to one of the guardposts in the JSA, overlooking the bridge to the North Korean DMZ. From here we were able to see Gijong-dong, or Peace Village, the motley collection of high-rise buildings known to everyone else as Propaganda Village. Funny story, here. You know the common knowledge - small man, big... car. Well, a few years back the South Koreans gave a flag to their villagers in Daeseong-dong. Of course, it needed to be erected on a pole 98m high, and the flag was equally enormous. So, because this is what grown men do these days, a Northern flagpole was installed, the Southern one was made a bit taller, and the North Koreans responded with a 160m flagpole - the tallest in the world - topped with the biggest flag currently in use. Our South Korean guide cast his eyes heavenwards in a brief comment on the silly North Koreans, then muttered "Anyway, their flag might be longer, but ours is wider" before swiftly moving on.
Men.
The modern-looking buildings are actually just empty shells; people arrive every morning to walk the streets, and leave in the evening, to give an appearance of industry. In the 90s, the empty buildings were used as stands for massive speakers which blared propaganda over the border, encouraging South Koreans to defect. After a few years, the South Koreans retaliated with their own speakers, the size of a house, apparently, and shot back at the North with... K-Pop! Which I think is possibly the funniest and most evil retaliatory shot I have ever heard of. Eventually the resultant din became too much for residents and soldiers to bear, and the South Korean president negotiated a pause in auditory hostilities in a historic visit to Pyongyang (the Northern capital).
From here we drove down to the guardpost the first guardpost was guarding. This second guardpost was at the edge of the Bridge of No Return - so-named because after the war, prisoners were exchanged here, and as they crossed the centre, they knew they could never return to the side they had just left. In 1976, the US complained that they were unable to see the second guardpost (I apologise for the amount I am going to use that word) from the first guardpost because of tall trees. Meanwhile the second guardpost was clearly visible from 3 KPA guardposts. This needed to be addressed, clearly. So one morning the US army pulled up to the tree, which was by the bridge leading out of JSA to North Korea, and started cutting it down. The KPA went mental, and, in stopping the tree-cutting, chopped up two US soldiers with axes.
Known, appropriately, as the
Axe Murder Incident, it was followed up three days later with an enormous operation involving more than 800 soldiers in which the tree was finally cut down in front of a small group of silent North Koreans.
1976 above; 2009 below:
The whole incident means that the UN forces now need permission to break a twig off the tree. And where previously the whole JSA was open to both sides, now the demarcation line is rigorously enforced, apart from within the central blue huts.
From the Bridge of No Return we were taken back to Camp Bonifas where, in a spectacular display of the incongruity of the DMZ, we spent 15 minutes wandering around the Most Dangerous Gift Shop In The World. Alongside the usual jewellery and postcards were tiny kids' dresses and trousers in camouflage, and t-shirts proudly declaring "DMZ: Demilitarized since 1953." Lighters and fridge magnets in the DMZ colours, Cokes and Snickers bars in the fridge, golf balls for your safe home course, pieces of wire from the fence... Ever so slightly distasteful!
Driving out of Camp Bonifas and away from the gun-filled Demilitarized Zone and the segregated Joint Security Area and all the other misnomers, I was pleased to have been there, though slightly disturbed to have been on an organised tour to such a dangerous and sad place - surely it belongs in a museum, and in photos, rather than in real life, here on my doorstep?
