Trip to the DMZ

Had to wake up early in the morning as I had planned to go to DMZ on a half day tour today.The tour operator was supposed to come to the hotel by 7:30 AM. Although it was a little tooearly for me, I woke up by 6.00 AM and was able to get out of the hotel room by 7 o clock. Quickly finished my breakfast and by the time i reached the concierge's desk, the tour operator was waiting for me. He introduced himself as charlie and told me that we would have to take a quick cab ride to Itaewon to meet up with the rest of the group. It was a cold morning and since it was a weekend, we were able to reach Itaewon in 5 minutes. Itaewon is famous for the presence of the american military base. One would notice the difference the minute you land in the place. All the shops would have english signs and you would typically see a lot of americans and the local shops and restaurants typically tend to cater to their needs. We waited for the mini-bus to arrive and at abt 8:10 I was in the mini-bus heading towards DMZ. There were abt a dozen other people in the bus and, except me, everyone else were either with their families or friends.

I was pretty excited abt the trip as I've already heard a lot about the DMZ. DMZ is a short form for de-militarized zone. It is basically a 4 km stretch of land (2 km from both the sides of the border) that has been "de-militarized". No human has set foot on this land for the past 50 years. There is barbed fencing across the 150 mile border between north and south koreas and various checkposts and bunkers all throughout the border.

Our first stop was the DMZ ticket office at Inkinjim where we were supposed to transfer to a tour bus. We got a glimpse of the "freedom bridge" through which more than 10,000 prisoners walked free from north korean prisons. Public is prohibited from taking pictures at most of the areas, so I was kind of careful with my camera. Walking through the area and looking at the different memorials, one would get a feeling that koreans suffered a lot of pain during seperation and they genuinely would like to be one country.

Our second stop was the third infiltration tunnel. This is basically a tunnel built by north koreans in the 1970's to infiltrate into south korea. It lies more than 70 m under land and is more than 2 km long. We took a short ride in a tram into the tunnel for about 1000 m and then walked the rest of 400m. Our tour guide went to great lengths to explain various facts to prove that the tunnel was infact built by north koreans (Apparently, the north claims that it was built by south and deliberately exposed just to malign them!!)




Our next stop was the Dorasan station which is the closest railway station to North Korea. It was built as a gesture towards re-unification of both the koreas and as of now only serves as a tourist spot. The station has makeshift schedules of trains going to Pyongyang. We spent about 15 mins in the station and were on our way back to Seoul.