Greetings,
Since my last post we’ve had to deal with the departure of our good friend Robb. He stayed with us in Busan for almost a month, although it seemed like less than a week. Hosting someone who was unfamiliar with the culture and the environment really brought a much needed freshness to our daily schedule. We’re sad he’s gone, but excited for the opportunities that await him back home.
Seeing as Robb’s visit was very recent, I thought I’d dedicate this entry to the trip we took with him and our friend Jason to the Demilitarized Zone. The trip had been on Katherine and my “to do” list since we arrived in October, but it was Robb’s temporary sojourn that motivated us to finally make it happen.
The Demilitarized Zone in Korea is a unique place. There, at the 38th parallel on the Korean peninsula, you can stand in between two remarkably powerful countries that have been at war with one another for nearly 60 years, and feel relatively safe. In fact, some people have felt so at ease with the stalemate that they have built and opened amusement parks and tourist attractions along the DMZ’s perimeter. Despite the recent rise in tension between the two Koreas, the DMZ now feels more like a tourist trap than the frontline of an ongoing war. The unnatural light-heartedness that has been brought to such a severe situation made our visit to the DMZ memorable, to say the least.
There are multiple tour companies which run monthly - if not weekly - trips to the DMZ. We chose Adventure Korea, a reputable industry in the ex-pat community. We met our bus in front of a shopping complex at 9:00 on a Sunday morning, and before we knew it we were heading north, into hotly contested real estate. The ride up was fairly bizarre. We met our tour guide, a mid-twenties Ohioan girl who looked like she was dressed to rock out at a Green Day concert. Fittingly, she blasted an odd assortment of 90s alternative music on the bus’s archaic speakers the whole ride up. Here we were, driving past sullen military outposts while being serenaded by Steven Page’s rendition of “It’s the end of the world as we know it.”
Our first stop was at a town located just outside the DMZ. The settlement’s claim to fame was a bridge that ran through its outskirts and into North Korea. Apparently this bridge had been used as a conduit through which prisoner exchanges took place. Equally as intriguing to the tourists was a small shop on the main road that sold North Korean currency. Acting against my cynicism towards these kinds of cliché touristy things, and despite being heckled by Kat for the same reasons, I purchased a couple paper bills and coins. They could very well be counterfeit, but how could I pass up the opportunity? Before boarding the bus my eyes were drawn to the presence of two statues of North and South Korean patrol guards. The thing that made these statues distinct from other memorial related sculptures was that they were made to look like anime-style children’s toys. The fact that such a serious symbol of national division was made into a sweet looking figurine reinforced our stereotype of Korea as a place that will inevitably cute-sify everything within its grasp.
From the bridge-town we made our way to a traditional Korean restaurant, where we enjoyed a simple meal of rice, seasoned vegetables, and some kind of fish. Nearby was another convenience store that sold the items every tourist to the area absolutely needs to purchase: DMZ t-shirts, key chains, and North Korean soju (rice liquor). The latter was a particularly popular purchase with the droves of foreigners cycling through the store. Having my North Korean currency in hand, I decided to opt out of any further, potentially regretful, purchases.
The tour’s next stop was at the infamous 3rd tunnel. The underground passageway was first discovered by South Koreans in the late 1970s. As we were told on the tour, it is estimated that the North could have sent 300,000 armed troops through this tunnel within an hour. We were also informed that this number of N.K. troops could have breached Seoul’s limits within an hour of their entrance into South Korea, but for several logical reasons related to transportation, this doesn’t seem plausible. Actually, this was not only incident during the tour where we were forced to question the legitimacy of the facts being told. On quite a few occasions, we looked at each other with expressions of puzzlement after listening to claims pertaining to the war, and current North-South relations. It was a cultural experience in the sense that we had to filter out what was most likely South Korean propaganda. Nevertheless, we braved the damp, dark tunnel while fashioning our bright yellow hard hats. At the very end of the tunnel there was a small rectangular hole cut into the earth, and through it we could see the tunnel’s extension into a dark abyss.
The small museum that stood beside the tunnel was perhaps the most peculiar aspect of the entire tour. Before seeing the actual museum, we sat in a small amphitheater and watched a documentary. After briefly explaining the Korean War and its armistice, the film suddenly changed thematic direction. One minute we were staring at real footage of a baby crying, sitting next to its slain mother, and the next we’re confronted with cheerful music and an eagle soaring above a heavily wooded area. Much to our surprise, the second half of the documentary focused on the DMZ as being a haven for nature and its wonderful beauty. It was a little disorienting. Combine our state of disbelief with idyllic shots of animals in nature and a very poorly scripted monologue narrated by a Korean version of Robert Goulet, and you’ve got thirty foreigners trying not to laugh at what is supposed to be a sobering experience.
The museum itself wasn’t much better. Beneath the glass floor of the main area was a diorama of the DMZ as natural wonder. Massive squirrels and birds clung to plastic trees and monster goats stood on painted green grass. The oversized model animals on display supplied the material for a number of whispered jokes among the visitors, one of them being: “I’d be more afraid of that pigeon than a North Korean attack.”
The trip ended with a stop at one of the best observatories for peering onto North Korean soil. We paid the equivalent of 20 cents to look through binoculars into the secluded state. The weather was fairly hazy, so we could barely make out the outline of a few buildings within North Korea’s second largest city. What we could see with decent clarity was a military outpost facing the South Korean border. A massive North Korean flag flew from the main building. Luckily, we were even able to spot a lone North Korean soldier, patrolling his outpost. I felt a bit like I was on a safari, catching a fortuitous glimpse of some rare and elusive species.
We had taken a glimpse inside arguably the most secretive society in the world, and yet, we didn’t feel as if we had taken part in something clandestine, or even remotely exclusive. The Demilitarized Zone was interesting, but the commercialization, and subsequent desensitization, of its existence left something to be desired. We boarded the big blue bus and headed for Seoul, all the while being engrossed by Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl.”
