Most of the time when I set out on a vacation I decide to take a real adventure. But work trips are a different kind of travel and I get a lot out of them too. I expected that my first work trip to Seoul would bring me lots of new experiences, but I didn’t figure that it would be anything quite as adventurous as a trip to the DMZ. I especially didn’t figure that I’d step across the northern side of the Military Demarcation Line.
We arrived a day over the weekend to recover from jetlag and decided that we’d do something interesting during the day. My boss had been to the DMZ before and we all decided to spend our free day there. It was fascinating.
The DMZ is a 2km buffer on either side of the MDL (Military Demarcation Line); there is no border between North and South Korea because they are still technically at war; there is no peace treaty in place. The DMZ is heavily armed on both sides with regular lookout points, razor wire fences and minefields and neither side is permitted to cross to the other side of the MDL. There is also a stunning amount of wildlife due to the total absence of humans. Unfortunately, it was so foggy that we saw little of it.
We went to the 3rd infiltration tunnel which was a ‘coal mine’ created by the North Koreans under the DMZ, through solid granite in the direction of Seoul. That’s right, solid granite. They painted the walls to make it look like coal. We took a little monorail down a steep and narrow tunnel (our helmets occasionally scraping the rock above us) to a point where we could walk through the tunnel to a point only meters from the MDL; we could see though a set of doors the North Korean side.
We also visited the Dorasan obervatory which has views into North Korea but the fog was so thick at that point that all we saw was white.
We hadn’t, however, been able to visit Panmunjeom, where the UN forces are stationed and the JSA, the Joint Security Area, which houses the conference building where talks are held. I was dying to see it, but tours are held only on a limited number of days. I extended my trip to have the opportunity to go, and Saturday when my colleagues were flying back I was on another freezing bus to the DMZ.
When we arrived at the JSA we got a brief slide show and were required to sign a document that said that we understood it was a volitile area, that we could be killed, that hand gestures of any sort were expressly forbidden. It gave us instructions on how to recognize the enemy, both soldiers and civilans. One signature later and we were off, first to the MAC conference room.
Both sides have massive buildings opposing one another on their respective sides of the border. When we came out onto the steps of the South Korean building, a soldier came out from the North Korean building and started examining us with binoculars. It was a little hard to believe that it was really happening.
The MAC conference room straddles the MDL so the the center conference table has one side sitting on the North and the other on the South. When tourists visit (from either side) however, they lock the opposite door and the visitors are allowed to cross to the other side of the conference room. So, for a few minutes I was on the North Korean side of the MDL, took the requisite pictures with the soldiers and headed back South.
[simpleviewer id="12" width="610" height="700" link=""]
[osm_map lat="37.941" long="126.715" zoom="11" width="600" height="450" marker="37.943,126.704"]
When I first started looking at travel to Victoria Falls, I cam across a photo of the Devil’s Pool, off of Livingstone Island. The Devil’s pool is right at the edge of mighty Victoria Falls, just off of the main fall. The pool is created by a natural rock ledge that prevents foreign objects, such as human beings, from being swept over the edge of the falls for three months out of the year, during the dry season. 
