A Day out at At the Korean Demilitarized Zone

We all felt like kids at kindergarten or animals going into the ark side by side. But our group was variously aged from twenties to close to 60 (me) and beyond. We were no kindergarten kids. And this was no kindergarten or ark, even if it did resemble a zoo at times.

This was the infamous Korean Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), straddling the 38th parallel, the artificial border created after the Korean War between South Korea and North Korea. This was the Joint Security Area, or JSA, where an armistice was signed on July 27, 1953 that ended the three-year Korean War. But, the war has still not officially ended - hence the DMZ and all the bizarre things that go with it.

Today, fear, mistrust, suspicion, paranoia and billions of dollars help to maintain what, to the cynical, seems a pointless exercise, but to the North and South Koreans, the US and the rest of the world, is a deadly serious game of cat and mouse that, if allowed to get out of hand, could have catastrophic results.

We arrived at the DMZ after 40 minutes in appalling Seoul traffic. Pyongyang, the North Korean showpiece capital, is 200 kilometres from the border. This artificial line has become the most heavily militarised area on earth, with American and South Korean soldiers almost tip-toeing around, trying not to offend the surly and paranoid North Koreans staring at them from an imposing, Stalinist building called the North Korean Visitor's Centre, a stone's throw away on the other side.

Name-calling and one-upmanship matter here. The South Korean building opposite the North Korean Visitor's Centre is called Freedom House. It was built to facilitate reconciliation between long lost relatives separated by the Korean War, but has never been used for that purpose. To outdo them, the North Koreans built their Visitor's Centre with an extra, useless, top level - just so their building would be higher than the south's Freedom Centre.

Flags are also big. When the South Koreans erected an enormous tower with a 272-kilogram flag on it - at the time the biggest in the world - the North Koreas put up a higher tower with a bigger flag.

And so it goes. The Korean War ended in July 1953. Yet, 56 years later, North and South Korean negotiators still meet in a nondescript building from time to time. The meetings take three hours on average. We were taken into this building, two by two. Inside is a wooden "Armistice Table" with three microphones on it, plumb in the middle of the 38th parallel dividing the countries, running right through the middle of the building. This is where the UN, Chinese and North Koreans signed the armistice, thus dividing the Korean Peninsula it seemed, forever. Also in the room were two South Korean military police officers who stood rigid in a tae kwondo stance, legs akimbo, fists clenched at the waist. I thought they were dummies at first, such was their unblinking, rocklike stillness.

In this Armistice Room, you can literally walk across from the free, dynamic South to the not-so-free and decidedly unexciting North, and back again in just five paces.

Strangely, in the 56 years that it has existed, the DMZ has only seen two incidents resulting in fatalities. The first was in 1974 when a Russian tourist tried to flee North Korea to seek asylum. The result was a four-minute firefight between North and South, which resulted in the death of one American soldier.

The second, in 1976, was the "Axe Murder Incident", "Hatchet Incident" or "Poplar Tree Incident", take your pick. North and South Korean soldiers and two Americans clashed over the trimming of a poplar tree that was inhibiting a line of sight. The resulting 20-second incident resulted in one American soldier, Captain Bonifas, being killed with an axe, and the other being dragged away and also killed with an axe. The JSA camp is now known as Camp Bonifas.

Back on the tour, we were told not to take photographs until permission was given. In the distance on the northern side, we saw what looked like a sizeable town, but in fact was a fake. Known, appropriately enough, as "Propaganda Village", the settlement is nothing but a facade. The North Koreans used it to blast out propaganda to the South at volume for a number of years, but have since given up on that idea, thank goodness.

One thing to remember when visiting the DMZ is that you should never wave your arms around in any way in front of the North Koreans, for fear of starting World War Three. This edict was ignored an Australian in our, who gesticulated while punctuating some point of conversation. All of us ducked for cover, out of the firing line, in case Kim Jong-il, North Korea's "Dear Leader", saw this behaviour as a subversive threat to his iron grip on power and ordered a nuclear strike.

Relieved that we had survived the tour of the DMZ, we quickly boarded the bus and hurtled back through the rather nice Korean countryside to our hotel.

 The DMZ is worth a visit just to say you have been there. Hundreds of thousands of people go every year and survive to tell the tale. I resisted buying a T-shirt at the souvenir shop, but plenty of people did. I suppose that if the sales help the South Korean economy, and Kim Jong-il gets none of the profit, it is worth it.

Alastair Carthew is a freelance writer and public relations consultant based in Phuket, Thailand. He attended the 10th annual Asia-European Editor's Forum in Seoul, South Korea in October, and visited the DMZ with a group of editors.