My Trip to the North Korean Border the Day Kim Jong-Il Died
This is the story of my visit to the DMZ, the most fortified and dangerous land border in the world, planned for the day the despotic North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-Il died.
Part of many tourist itineraries for Seoul and the surrounding areas is a trip to the DMZ, or Demilitarized Zone, the border between North and South Korea once described as the most dangerous place in the world by Bill Clinton, amongst others. As I sit here writing this now, a month after the Paris terror attacks in November 2015 and with mass shootings seemingly occurring daily in American schools and institutions, I no longer feel inclined to agree with Clinton, and in fact, the attitude of most South Koreans to the threat from the North is one of indifference. Yes, it gets reported on the news whenever the cousins in the North pull military manoeuvres or test a new rocket. Indeed, just today in fact, the North ‘successfully tested’ a hydrogen bomb deep under the rocky, barren surface of the country in a maze of tunnels and catacombs the ex-UK ambassador to North Korea speaking on Radio 4 said made Tora Bora look like a child’s playground. The test explosion caused a quake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale and left me belatedly wondering if that deep vibration I felt as I sat at my desk writing this morning around 10 a.m. was caused by the North’s experiment or a particularly laden lorry on the road outside.
Media Hype
However, this bluster and military one-upmanship is not reported here with nearly the same fetishistic fervour as it is in the Western media, where any kind of story related to North Korea gets column inches, and there are at least two articles a week on social media with such clickbait titles as ‘A year in the most dangerous country on earth’ or ‘Photos from the hermit kingdom — what life is really like inside the world’s last remaining communist dictatorship.’ Years of putting up with the North’s posturing has meant that in the South, people appear increasingly desensitized and go about their daily lives in the full knowledge that if the North ever did try anything, it would in all likelihood be over very quickly for them, given the huge and vastly superior South Korean and US military presence south of the border, not to mention the probability of China and Japan pitching in to defeat the evildoers. South Koreans of course keep one eye on proceedings in the North, but despite several scares and high-level episodes of brinkmanship in my five years here, I have never felt as though the South has gone into panic mode, instead staying cool, calm, and collected for the most part.
Booking the Tour
It is exactly this morbid fascination with the situation between the two Koreas that gives the DMZ its tourist appeal. There are relics from the Korean War all around and the thrill of being on the potential front line of World War III. A friend of mine, Justin, was visiting with his girlfriend as part of a grand tour of Asia a month after I arrived in Korea in late 2011, and it was certainly something they were keen to experience.
They were visiting Seoul and the surrounding area for the better part of a week, and once I’d met them off the subway from Incheon, we went straight to the nearest barbecue place near my house in Itaewon. We ordered up plenty of samgyupsal, beer, and side dishes and got grilling. A conversation ensued then about what would be a good tourist itinerary for the week. I suggested all the usual haunts — Gwangjang market, Namsan Tower, and the palace district. It wasn’t long before Justin’s girlfriend told me an organised tour to the DMZ was high on her list of priorities. The best and most authentic tour is actually run by the US military, leaving from Yongsan Army Base, but these tours are somewhat infrequent and almost always booked up. Luckily for us, there are other companies that run these tours, and with a bit of research, we found out that tours could be booked at the Lotte Hotel in downtown Seoul. So the next day, a freezing Friday in December, we went down to the Lotte Hotel in Myeong Dong to book tickets for the three of us to go to the DMZ on an organised tour.
I asked around and was told that the concierge was the person to speak to if we wanted to book a DMZ tour. The concierge turned out to be a gorgeous French girl called Elena, and I, being new to Seoul, was looking to make friends. I chatted her up about the best places to go out in Seoul and resolved to come back to the hotel should any more travel needs arise in the near future. She gave us a leaflet for the tour, which told us in detail all the things we should refrain from doing when we arrived at the DMZ: no pointing at the North Korean border guards, no flash photography, dress appropriately, your actions could put you and others in possible life-threatening danger, etc. We all listened very seriously to her advice, wondering if it was actually just for show and in some way part of the whole experience. It did remind us however, that the place we were heading to wasn’t exactly Disneyland.
Hearing the News at the British Embassy
After we booked the tour for the following day, we headed over to the British Embassy as Justin had some problem or other with his passport and had been stopped several times by border guards in the Asian countries he had visited previous to Korea. The only times I had been to the embassy were for work parties or to go to the embassy bar on a Friday night (best selection of whiskies in Seoul, huge measures, happy times), and I had never actually been into the main consulate area.
As we were let through security at the embassy in order to check his passport, we could see on a TV screen in the guard’s hut that, under a breaking news banner, Sky’s rolling news coverage was showing something about North Korea, but we couldn’t make out exactly what.
As we walked into the main waiting area, we were greeted by more screens telling us exactly what had happened — Kim Jong Il, the despotic dictator of North Korea, had died, and tensions between the North and South were likely to be heightened. Hearing the news at the embassy somehow made the event grander, adding a note of gravitas and importance to the situation. Since we were there, we assumed we might be given some advice on the situation, but not much was forthcoming. Justin did whatever paperwork needed to be done while his girlfriend and I watched BBC breaking news coverage and wondered what would come next. Everyone knew North Korea was one of the most unstable regimes in the world, and the early talk on rolling news was about how with the passing of Kim Jong Il there would be even more instability, which could be dangerous.
Back out on the street, there was a palpable feeing of tension in the air, and I even saw homemade signs go up on the entrances to a couple of subway stations that had the front page of the daily newspaper showing the news about the North Korean leader’s death. It was clearly big news. The elderly and homeless gathered round public TV screens in Seoul Station, the city’s main train station, to keep out of the cold and find out what was happening up North.
Obviously, by this point, we knew that our plans to go to the DMZ had been put in major jeopardy, and we immediately assumed the whole thing would be called off.
I called Elena at the hotel, who explained to me that, yes, the tour the following day had been cancelled because everything was very dangerous and serious, and we would not, in fact, be able to do our trip that day. I did ask her if she knew when we would be able to go, but she said she had no idea when the DMZ excursion program was likely to reopen and that we should probably come back to the ticket office to get a refund as it was unlikely we would be able to go in the next few days. Justin and his girlfriend were really disappointed. They wouldn’t be back in this part of the world again any time soon, and they had been banking on adding a DMZ to their list of travel experiences.
As it happened, though, we decided not to go back to the hotel and get a refund, and we held on to our tickets in the hope that the tours would recommence at any point during Justin’s trip, and we would still be able to go. We went back to Itaewon, bought a few beers, and switched on the rolling TV news coverage of what was going on. It was the lead story across the main news channels, and the presenters and pundits spent countless hours analysing the situation, explaining how things would or would not be different in the future and giving us the low-down on the Kim family and who was likely to take charge now. At this point, I was receiving slightly worried messages from friends and family who wanted to know what the situation was and how it was being reported in South Korea. I even received an email from work giving assurances that there was nothing to worry about.
The Tour is Still on!
The next day, we called the hotel to find out whether the tours were scheduled to be back on for the following day, not really expecting that to be the case, but to our amazement, tours were set to be running and all restrictions on visiting the DMZ would be lifted. Initially, we were surprised. Surely an event of this magnitude should warrant a bit more time to get back to normal. But then we started to think a bit more carefully about the situation, surmising that the United States and South Korea had probably known of Kim Jong Il’s failing health far in advance, and the procedures for dealing with the aftermath would have been put in place many months, if not years, earlier. Indeed, it was even posited by some that he had already died several years earlier and the North Koreans had kept it under wraps until a successor was arranged and confirmed. Whatever the situation, it was business as usual, and the death of one of the world’s biggest tyrants made not so much a splash as a ripple in day-to-day affairs on the peninsula.
So, the next day, we jumped in a cab and headed down to the hotel to exchange our tickets and catch our bus. Evidently, most people had expected the tour to be cancelled and decided to forgo what was normally a very popular tour, as the bus only had a few slightly scared-looking Americans and a Thai couple on board.
Before we got going, the tour guide explained to us in almost completely unintelligible English what had happened the previous day (as if we could have failed to notice), saying that the border guards and things in general might be a bit more on edge than normal. She went on the say that it was especially important at this delicate time that we don’t point our cameras at the North Korean side of the border.
On these DMZ tours, they tend to take you to all sorts of locations along the way — the peace bridge, an observatory from the Korean War, some tunnels used by North Korea to infiltrate the South. It’s all very interesting, but what people really want to experience is the Panmujeom Joint Security Area, or JSA. You’ve probably seen photos of it — three huts straddling the border between North and South and a bunch of guards from each side facing off, seemingly daring one another to flinch and thus provoke all-out war and very possibly the end of the human race as we know it. As part of the tour, you are allowed inside one of the huts, and technically, as the border runs right through the middle of the hut, permitted to set foot in North Korea for a few seconds. Pictures are allowed there, and suddenly, it did all become very Disneyland-ish. There we were, snapping photos of snarling border guards in full uniform one moment and being led to a fully stocked gift shop the next, replete with North Korean alcohol and handicrafts.
Final Thoughts
While a certain nervousness indeed hung in the air, as you would imagine, the day unfolded as expected and somewhat remarkably, none of us was held at gun point or bundled into the back of a van as we snapped our photos of the grim-faced soldiers on the front lines of “the most dangerous border in the world”. We jumped back on the bus and sped off back to Itaewon to sample some North Korean whisky alongside a few beers to calm our still-jangling nerves.
