DMZ, North Korea
What an experience. It is a pretty expensive trip if you don’t have your own transportation because there are only a couple of ways to get from Seoul out to the border of North Korea. Friends of ours spent 50,000 WON (45 USD) but they did get a guide. In reality, I planned not to go and visit this importin place due to the price. Thankfully a Korean friend of mine asked us to go visit with him. The tour ticket was 10,000 WON (9 USD).
Driving to the base was interesting. You could see everything change the closer you got. Along the river, there were more and more military precautions and watchtowers. The towns started to get smaller and more run down. It looked ghostly apart from the farmlands.
You can look into the countryside of North Korea at the car park. What is most scary about this is while you are looking into the hillsides you can hear explosions and watch patrol guards walk up and down the riverside.
Fun fact: if one person in your family does something wrong in North Korea your whole family goes to a concentration camp.
Before we even got into the DMZ we heard so many scary stories about these families and kids who were born in these camps and lived the rest of their lives without seeing what was on the other side. …. Maybe not such a fun fact…
A lookout point into the North Korean territory, this stop was one of my favorites. I wish we had more time there but we met some Italian soldiers and ended up talking for the majority of our time. The parts that we did see were fantastic! You could see several different North Korean cities as well as their signal jammer tower. Another interesting thing was that they had a fake city that was used to miss represent the countries actual state. It is now inhabited but wasn’t for the longest time. What was very strange to me was there is actually a South Korean village located inside the borders of North Korea. I can’t even imagine what that must be like.
Tunnels to South Korea. Impressively but mostly terrifyingly there is a tunnel from North Korea to the south. The goal was to get all the way to Seoul, lucky they were caught before anything bad happen. And by lucky, I mean unbelievably lucky because the only reason they found the tunnel was from a nearby lake being slowly drained. It is suspected that there are bigger and longer tunnels that have not been found yet.
We weren’t allowed to take our phones in so sadly I do not have any photos. We walked down a steep slope to get to the start of the actual tunnel. Along the walls, you could see where they were scraping and using dynamite to form the walls. They had a little sean set up to show you how they were working and it was rather heart wrenching.
About 800m into the cave, you come to the borderline where there is a series of walls with one window where you can see into North Korea. Well, you could if it wasn’t pitch black. Still, it was so interesting because in-between these walls you could see they had booby-traps set up just in case. This really gave us the visual aspect that these two countries are still at war.
Train station to North Korea, which actually does not run anymore. It was bizarre to me to such new infrastructure at each of the border lines. I couldn’t understand because I thought that these countries had been separated for so long that there was no need for them. However, my friend explained to me that at some points in their history they collaborated in factories but at this moment they did not. Although they are looking to start this up again now that the countries are communicating.
Food we ate here: In the car park, we ate street food. We had Korean pancake with seafood with kimbap and fishcakes. It was a fantastic meal!
Inside DMZ, at the market, we tried a typical rice cake sweet called Ppeongtwigi (뻥튀기). It might be my new favorite thing.
