2007-06-03 04:00:00 PST Panmunjeom, Korea — It's the thing to do, of course -- to straddle the line on the floor, one foot touching lightly down in North Korea, the other planted firmly in South Korea. As I take my turn I make a little joke about keeping a foothold in the South, so I can get away from Kim Jong-il and scamper back to Seoul if I have to. It's humor born of tension: This is, after all, a weird little sidelight to the most heavily fortified border in the world.
It's surprisingly subdued here, considering there are soldiers from both Koreas (and from America) everywhere, looking right at you. Looking at you as you enter a small blue building on the border dividing the communist North from the capitalist South. Looking at you when you peer through mounted outdoor telescopes into North Korea, one of the most isolated countries on the planet, and see Pyongyang's soldiers peering back.
It's hard to believe all this strangeness, all this tension, all this primed weaponry, is only as far from the glass and steel towers of Seoul, a city of 11 million people, as Palo Alto is from San Francisco -- barely 35 miles.
The demilitarized zone slashes across Korea so close to the capital because the North occupied Seoul during the Korean War of 1950-53, and invading Northern forces were driven only a little way off by the time the fighting stopped. The war was put on pause by an armistice, not a peace treaty. So, technically, the two sides are still at war.
Like most DMZ tourists, I came on a side trip from Seoul, a city that surprised me with its newfound sense of style and hipness, challenging its long-held reputation as a dull, business-only place. More on that later.
A number of companies offer bus tours to the DMZ -- said to be South Korea's No. 1 tourist attraction, thanks to its starkness and vague undertow of danger -- and you must book a tour to go there.
After boarding a tour bus in downtown Seoul, I set off on tour, alighting inside the zone at Panmunjeom, where diplomats from the Koreas, the United States and the United Nations meet from time to time to talk things over. Many commercial tours take you into the aforementioned blue building on the border -- a small, spare structure that looks and feels like a prefabricated schoolhouse. Inside, a line marking the border runs across the floor and right down the middle of the negotiators' conference table.
American GIs can relate the history of the place, much of it gloomy and even grisly. In 1976, for example, two U.S. soldiers pruning a poplar tree inside the DMZ near here were bludgeoned and hacked to death by North Korean troops carrying axes -- an incident that sparked the largest military buildup in the area since the armistice. In 1984, a Soviet dignitary suddenly dashed across the line to defect, chased by North Korean troops with guns blazing. Over the years there have been many other incidents.
Nothing like this is likely to happen while you're there, but hearing about such events reminds visitors -- and the troops themselves, who serve as a tripwire in any future invasion -- that the DMZ is a deadly serious place, not a Cold War theme park.
In addition to Panmunjeom, my tour included a stop at the surreally named Third Tunnel of Aggression. This is one of four known tunnels passing under the DMZ, dug secretly by the North and discovered by South Korean troops in the 1970s. You can venture a few hundred yards into the forbidding tunnel, at a maximum depth of some 220 feet. The passageway is wide -- wide enough to allow an infiltrating division to march by in a matter of hours. Northern officials deny the tunnel is military, insisting it was dug to mine coal. However, Southern authorities say there is no coal anywhere near the site; the walls of the tunnel were made black not by coal, but with black paint.
The DMZ, a big place at 2 1/2 miles wide and 155 miles long, has unexpectedly become a wildlife refuge due to the fact that virtually no people have lived in it for more than half a century. Eagles, cranes, wild oats, foxtail millet and more are said to thrive there. Environmentalists hope the DMZ will become a national park when Korea finally reunites, though this ideal outcome is far from guaranteed. In any case, wildlife is rarely visible from visitors' vantage points. Fences, guard houses and barbed wire are more like it.
Of necessity, visits to any part of the DMZ are highly structured. There is, for example, a dress code: no shorts, torn jeans, tank tops or anything else thought to be disrespectful or provocative. You are required to carry your passport. There are clearly marked areas where you can go, and areas you can't (with cause: the DMZ is heavily mined).
