Mood: Somber
Music: Kings of convenience
Today started with a 7:50am pick up from my hotel by my guide for the day. There was only one other on the tour with me, a Canadian school teacher with a penchant for travel.
We set out heading north out of the city of Seoul towards the border. On the way we mostly travelled up alongside a river. The edge of the river has razor wire along a fence with lookout stations every hundred meters or so. The reason for this, we were told, was that even so the other side of the river is in the south, North Korean spies use the river to gain entry to the south.
They also have nets on the river every so often. These occasionally catch bodies floating down from the north and they have also caught mines attached to floatation devices that have been released by the north.
As we got closer to the DMZ the traffic thinned out and we arrived into the large car park, with attached peace gardens from which the tours into the DMZ leave. Our guide lead it's from our transfer bus and into the tour bus. At the end of the bridge that marks the edge of the civilian controlled zone we had our passports checked before being allowed to proceed.
The first stop inside was the 3rd tunnel found by the South Koreans that the north were digging under the area. The tunnel is deep underground, blasted through solid granite using dynamite.
This tunnel was apparently located by the drilling of a large number of bore holes by the south Koreans following a tip off by a defecting tunnel designer. The holes were filled with water that was checked from the surface. As the bed rock is granite there was no leakage until the tunnel was located as it passed through such a hole.
Personally I don't believe that more modern techniques weren't used. It seems like a but of a yarn to stop the identification method being revealed to the North Koreans. I'd suggest that a form of triangulating sonar in the bed rock would be fairly foolproof. These days ground scanning radar/sonar would work too I guess but I'm not too familiar with the modes of operation of such kit.
Anyway... I digress... Next up was the view point of the 1st battalion. It was for this one hill that 30,000 American's and Koreans were killed during the war. It holds a very prominent position looking over the rivers in front of it and is obviously of great tactical significance. From here you can look out over the barriers to North Korea. It is not permissible to take photos from the within 10m of the barriers and a large yellow line marks this out on the floor. Apparently due to the potential for camera flash to be mistaken for muzzle flash. As I'm quite tall I could hold my camera up at full stretch and photograph over from behind the line. I was then asked by numerous people to do the same for them due to my hight! Rolf id sat on one of the telescopes at the viewing platform.
From here we were taken to a gift shop selling foods grown in the dmz and also some North Korean foods and beverages.
Our final stop was the train station on the north end of the southern part of a train line that runs all the way through Korea and up into China. This station has never served the train it was built for and wool not do so until unification. Our guide said they are preparing for either unification or another Korean war.
The visit finished with a trip to an amethyst factory a few meters from my hotel.
In the evening I went back out into the city to take some night shots of the main street of this city with over 20 million inhabitants.
And that's about it for today!
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