On The Border

Visiting the Korean DMZ may be a little safer in future now that US war games are over.

- Brett Atkinson

Now you see him, now you don’t. Less than 100m across the planet’s most dangerous border, a North Korean soldier is playing peekaboo with a group of curious travellers on a day trip from Seoul.

Flanked by two guard towers, he will stand, eyes front and motionless, for a shift of 12 hours. If he were to try to defect, he wouldn’t make it past the bottom stair of the boxy Stalinist structure he’s protecting. No wonder he keeps ducking behind a pillar to avoid being the subject of another snapped shot on a tourist’s Instagram feed.

From downtown Seoul it is just 56km to the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), the 4km-wide, 240km long buffer bisecting the Korean Peninsula more or less on the 38th parallel. Views of Seoul’s soaring 21st-century skyline soon give way to the low banks of the Han River, crowned with camouflage watchtowers and festooned for kilometres with a tangle of razor wire. The river forms the border with North Korea, and stringent security has deterred northern spies and interlopers since the Korean War ended in 1953.

Our tour’s first stop is at the Dorasan railway station, opened by George W Bush in 2002, and built to link the North and South if reunification ever takes place. Spacious concourses are constructed in the optimistic expectation of accommodating thousands of travellers, and all the familiar furniture of border crossings is in place: windows for passport control, an overpriced gift shop and a shuttered currency exchange booth listing dollars, yen and euros. A graffitied slab of the Berlin Wall standing on the platform is a poignant reminder that borders once closed forever can reopen.