The Demilitarized Zone Tour

There are many tour companies throughout Seoul running these tours, offering visits to various historically significant sites along the border for between 40,000 and 130,000 won ($35 to $115) depending on where they stop.. Because of the sensitive nature of the JSA, tours there require advanced notification of participants at least three days in advance.

Traveling out of Seoul and toward the DMZ leads you along the Han River where constantly manned guard towers are space about every 100 meters. You can see how vital these towers are to the security of Seoul. There have been amphibious encroachments into the city by North Korean operatives using the river. Nonchalantly, that North Korea presently has the capability to destroy Seoul in less than two hours. Pyongyang has certainly threatened on numerous occasions to turn Seoul into a “sea of flames,” but would a modern country like South Korea really be powerless to stop a destructive attack from the North on their most important city?

Far from completely creating a manufactured view of the North, the tour’s first stop is a museum with an observation deck where one could look directly at a small farming village across the DMZ. The museum housed artifacts including treaties between the two countries, North Korean military medals, currency, and even soju, Korea’s national liquor. There are also symbols of reunification, including examples of countries that were once divided. Some of these are inspiring (Germany) and some are less so (Yemen). The most interesting symbol of reunification is the imagined “Seoul-Pyongyang-Paris” bullet train, which the Museum suggested would take tourists from Korea to Europe as soon as reunification was achieved. Dorasan Station located in another part of the DMZ did indeed once connect the North and South by train. It is, however, understandable why a rail link between the North and South might figure prominently in the imagination of some South Koreans, South Korea currently has no land borders, aside from the one with the North.

These tours take place daily. Anyone who goes to the observation deck cannot help but wonder what those on the other side of the border think about the gawking tourists watching them. With the lack of context provided by the tour, watching these people is really just an opportunity to write whatever preconceptions we had about life in to the North on to these people across the border from you. To some, they may have look like suffering laborers, slaves to a dictatorial regime. More likely they were just regular farmers doing their job and making the most of their difficult lives.

After the museum, you head to the Bridge of Freedom located adjacent to Imjingak Park. During the Korean War, the bridge was a place where defecators could cross from the North to the South, knowing that they that they may never be able to go to the other side again. Since the end of the war, families would come to the sight to remember their relatives from whom war had separated them. Despite the sadness associated with its history, the area has a carnival like atmosphere. For most Koreans, those memories are much more distant that they were in the last century, so to keep the location attracted for the younger generation an amusement park, complete with a Viking ship has been built near the bridge.