Life in Kanazawa: Musings from the Far East: The DMZ

Friday, March 30, 2007

The DMZ

Our one daytrip outside of Seoul was to the DMZ, or the De-Militarized Zone, separating North and South Korea. It is a bit of an ironic name, I think, as there are more military personnel surrounding the DMZ than anywhere else in Korea, I suspect, but within the four km wide, 260 km long section there are none. The tour started out by visiting Memorial Altar, the furthest north point that Korean citizens are allowed to go to. This is a memorial for people to honour and pray for their family members that are on the other side of the border. The prayers are symbolised by yellow ribbons which are tied to trees around the area. Next we passed through the military checkpoint, as Korean citizens can not go this far, and visited the Third Tunnel, a tunnel the North Koreans began digging towards Seoul. The tunnel is actually 400m past the DMZ, but we were only able to go through about 250m of it. We then proceeded to an observatory where we could watch North Korea. From what we could see the two km of North Korean DMZ looked identical to the 2 km of South Korean DMZ, but apparently they have a bigger flag. From here it was onto Dora Station, famous because it was visited by George Bush when it was opened. This is a train station for the train that will "soon" be running between North and South Korea. All in all, it was a pretty interesting trip. On the drive up, upon leaving Seoul, the highway was surrounded by barbed wire and soldiers in watch towers. Soldiers were on guard everywhere, and most places we were not allowed to take pictures (so you must excuse the scarcity of them here). There seems to be high hopes of re-unification in Korea, but with the knowledge that the likelihood of it happenning may be the same as of it not happenning anytime soon.