SEOUL TRAIN

Borders are strange things. Sometimes the only clue you've passed from one country to another is when your phone stops working as it hunts for a new network.

- WORDS JASON BARLOW PHOTOGRAPHY CHRISTIAN BITTMANN

Not in South Korea. When you hit the demilitarised zone that separates it from the north, you know all about it. The DMZ spans 160 miles from coast to coast, and it's almost three miles wide. OK, so you don't hit a giant wall as you approach, or suddenly become besieged by suicide drones (yep, they're a thing), but everything feels a little... other. First you spot a growing number of military vehicles and personnel. Normal traffic thins out to the point that there isn't any at all. Eerie. Our all new, plus sized Hyundai Ioniq 9 - no shrinking violet, this - is now hiding in plain sight. Then you notice the so called 'tank traps', giant concrete blocks at strategic intervals on the roadside. These can be detonated to stop an invading force from progressing any further. This is what paranoia looks and feels like.

You can't blame them. South Korea has effectively been at war with its neighbour for more than 70 years, locked in a high stakes stalemate that's one of the world's more curious geopolitical conundrums. Not least because life under Kim Jong Un's regime - blue jeans are banned because they're a symbol of Western decadence - is somewhat different from the one lived in the south. Seoul has been bullied a fair bit over the years, and had to reconstruct and reimagine itself following the fighting in the 1950s. It's done so in relentlessly inventive style. The city is a dreamscape of endless gleaming steel and chrome buildings, the climax of the movie Inception made real. The streets in the Seongsu and Sinsadong districts fizz and pop with the intense energy only a big Asian city provides - creative, fashionable and a bit bonkers. Seoul is currently sixth on the list of the world's biggest metropolitan economies behind Paris, San Francisco, LA, Tokyo and New York. But it's ahead of London.