DMZ trip

One of the things I wanted to do while in Korea was visit the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. There are many tours offered by different companies, but we decided to try out another trip with Adventure Korea. The DMZ tour was on Sunday, so 5 of us decided to leave for Seoul early Saturday morning so that we could get the most out of our weekend in the big city.

When we got off the KTX in Seoul our first stop was Namdaemun Gate. I had very briefly seen Namdaemun the first time I was in Seoul, but about 3 weeks ago it was set ablaze by a 70 year old man angry at the government. Like a lot of Koreans and tourists, we wanted to see the aftermath of this event. Namdaemun is the South gate of the city and is Korea's #1 National Treasure. The city didn't waste any time and already had huge walls around the gate and were dong work on the inside. They did leave one little plastic window to peer inside, but most of what you could see was scaffolding. As you can see in the pictures, there has been paper put up all around the wall for people to write messages, and still weeks after the fire there were many visitors to the site.

The rest of the day was pretty much a blur of market shopping and touring the Seoul subway lines. We finally checked into our hostel and then went out again for the rest of the night. We met up with Marla and Rosie (two other Daeguites who decided to come into Seoul a little later) and Ryan and Allison for dinner. Ryan and Alli took us to a restaurant and introduced us to one of my new favourite Korean foods - 닭 갈비 (dak galbi). Dak galbi is chicken cooked in a spicy stirfry with cabbage, other greens, rice dough noodles and ramyen noodles. After that we checked out a few different bars, but decided to call the night semi-early as we had to get up for the tour the next day.

Sunday brought us to the DMZ and what Bill Clinton called "the scariest place on earth". Korea is the only divided country in the world and the DMZ marks the line of division and the 2 km on either side of the "truce line". To be allowed in the DMZ area you have to be with a tour group and must carry your passport or alien registration card with you. Every tour company visits different sites on the DMZ, which would definatley determine what kind of experience you have at the DMZ. Overall, I think that our tour was good, but not great. The first stop on the tour was the Freedom Bridge, which was an old train line also used to exchange prisoners after the Korean War. Next was lunch in Tongilchon, one of the only two villages in the DMZ. This village is famous for it's production of soybeans, especially the making of soybean paste which is used in many Korean food dishes. The third stop was the 3rd tunnel - discovered in 1978, this tunnel was dug from North Korea to come into the south and attack Seoul. The tunnel is 73 meters below the ground and only 2 meters in height, 2 meters in width and 1635 meters in length. We were allowed to walk the tunnel until approximately 150 or so meters away from North Korea - no pictures allowed! One of the crazy things about this tunnel is that the rocks were covered in charcoal so that if found the North Koreans could pass it off as an abandoned mine! In total, four tunnels have been found on the DMZ, but there is an estimated 20 more still out there.

After the tunnel we traveled to the Dora Observatory where we could actually get a view of Kesung City, the second largest city in North Korea. At the lookout platform we were allowed to take photos, but were restricted to taking photos only behind the yellow line. Two people on the tour (of course one of them was with us) forgot about the photo line and had their cameras taken by Korean soldiers and their photos searched. Luckily our tour leader was a cool guy and got the soldiers to give the cameras back very quickly. From this view point we could also see the world's tallest flag pole (160 meters) on the North Korean side which was built to top the South Korean's pole at 98 meters. The North Korean "propaganda village" can also be seen, which was designed with extremely tall buldings to give the impression that the North was a prosperous nation. It is said that these buildings are not even functional after the first floors and that they do not even have windows!

Finally, or last stop was the Dorasan station, a train station that will eventually be the gateway to North Korea, the rest of Asia and Europe. Currently they have a few trains a day running from Seoul to Dorasan and then into the North. These trains are only for cargo thus far. At the station we got to stamp our passports with unofficial stamps to say that we had been to this station (I don't know if we are technically even supposed to put stamps like this in our passport). After the tour we headed straight back to Daegu to get some much needed rest.