Day 17: DMZ

Today is the historic summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un in Singapore.

Completely by coincidence, we booked the DMZ tour for the same day. The DMZ describes the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea, established because of the Korean War Armistice Agreement of 27 July 1953. The Korean War began in June 1950 when North Korea (supported by China and Russia) invaded South Korea (Support by the United States). The UN dispatched forces to repel the invasion and after the agreement was created, each side moved their troops back 2000m from the front line creating a buffer zone which is still here to this day. Seoul changed hands numerous times and it certainly wasn’t as simple as I have described, but you get the gist!

We decided to suffer breakfast one more time, even though it was awful, as our pickup was 7.45am; It was again terrible apart from the coffee. Our driver was a bit early so we set off around 7.35am to meet up with the rest of our group and transfer to a coach. Our guide for the day was George, he was an odd, suited guy with a Lloyd Grossman-esq accent! 

It was an hours drive to the DMZ; we were asked numerous times if we had our passports as the company had to register our visit ahead of time. The first stop was Imjingak Park, located about 5 miles from the demarcation line. It was built in 1972 with the hope that unification would someday be possible. This is also where the “Bridge of Freedom” lies which crosses the Imjin river. It is a former railroad bridge which was used by repatriated POWS returning from the north. There is also a memorial which depicts the families separated because of the war and the remains of a partly destroyed train from the war. Our food tour guide yesterday, Janet, actually told us about her father-in-law who was North Korean; he was in Seoul when they shut the border and was unable to return so was unable to see his daughter and wife ever again. We were only given 15 minutes here as we had to then pass through the security checkpoint in order to access the other parts of our tour.

The bus stopped before “Unification Bridge” so a member of the South Korean army could board our bus and check our passports before driving across. Our next port of call was the “3rd Infiltration Tunnel,” a tunnel built by the North Koreans and one of 4 discovered since 1974. Each tunnel is large enough to enable the passage of 30000 soldiers within 1 hour. The 3rd tunnel penetrates into South Korea by 435 meters beyond the ceasefire line and was found following the detection of an underground explosion in June 1978. We had to leave all our possessions in a locker so unfortunately we have no pictures from the tunnel as photography is forbidden, but I can assure you it was a steep decline going down. Tourists can walk as far as the third barricade and see into the second through a small window, but the the South Koreans blocked it at the demarcation line.Unfortunately, we then had to climb back up; talk about feeling the burn, my legs were killing me!

The below picture shows the security cameras within the tunnel so hopefully you can see a bit of the tunnel.

After our exercise, we had an ice-cream in the spare 5 minutes we had before going to the DMZ theatre and museum where we learned a bit more about the Korean War. Our next stop was the Dora Observatory, the closest observation post to North Korea. I could look through binoculars and view Gaeseong City, the third largest in North Korea. We could clearly see the North Korean scenery as it was a beautiful day; it did look a bit like a Hollywood set as we could see no movement apart from 4 quad bikes.

After this visit, we went to Dorasan Station; the northernmost station in South Korea. The milestones in the station show Seoul is 56km away and Pyeongyang 205km away; it also shows the reality of the current situation as the $40 million station sits unused. The hope for the future is that someday it will take you to Europe through the Trans-Siberian railway. Our guide told us to buy chocolate and North Korean alcohol if we wanted to buy souvenirs; the chocolate is made in the unification village within the DMZ on the South Korean side and apparently before the war, North Korean alcohol was the best!

Our last stop of the day was an amethyst factory before being dropped in Itaewon, the expat area that we were in the previous evening. We were desperate for lunch but everything seemed closed until 5pm; we eventually found a Canadian restaurant so I had a pulled pork sandwich and a beer. We sat for an hour before heading back to the hotel to drop off our wares.

It was quite hot and humid today but the sky was clear so we decided to go to N Seoul Tower. We walked from the hotel to the cable car station; we did consider walking to the tower but it was 1.4km and we had already went on a detour to a monument which we didn’t realise was a dead-end. The cable car took about 25 seconds to get to the platform. We had a few more steps to climb before getting to the bottom of the tower; there were “love-locks” everywhere so we thought we would be romantic and get one....yep I know what your thinking! We decided to go to the observation deck before attaching the lock to the walkway; what we didn’t consider was that we would be there about 2 hours. We saw the sun set and night fall; Seoul is very different in the day time and seems to come alive at night. 

It was 9pm by the time we walked back to the hotel; we turned on CNN to see what they were making of the Trump-Kim summit then hit the sack. The plan was to have a well-deserved lie-in....