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…
