A note about the pictures. The images that you might want to see are small so click on the picture to enlarge them on the web browser, Ara1. At the top of the hill in the center you can see a North Korean guard post.
2. This is on the reverse slope of the observation observatory, not facing the north. The Korean words spell out "One Country"
3. This is the best shot that I could get of the north south transit point, toll booths, and visitors center. If you click on the image and look at the bottom right of the green sign at center you can see that it says, "North South Transit Point."
4. Looking back south at the beach. Note the rail line and the excellent shape that it is in. It was just opened to serve as a way to transport goods to the North Korean port of Woosan.
5. Tour busses heading to Mount Gamesong. The mountain is the tallest one in the distance to the right. The actual border can be seen about fifty meters in front of the busses. Look at the road and note what looks like big pillars on either side. This is the border.
North Korea
Sokcho Diary 25.9.06
Sunday was a pretty big day for me. After having lived in Korea off and on for just over a year now I finally got to go up to the border of the last Stalinist, closed, society left in a world that has seen the fall of almost every Communist country.
There was a time, just twenty short years ago when the communist world was still going head to head with the capitalist one. Communism held sway over Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Cuba, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and North Korea. Almost half of the world was under some form of Communist rule.
All that has now changed. Russia has become a democracy, at least in name, and its former client republics have emerged to become some of the newest democratic nations on the face of the earth. Some like Hungary and the Baltics have met with success and been welcomed into the realm of “free world” countries while others like Belarus and the central Asian republics have descended into chaos and dynastic rule. China and Vietnam are Communist in name only, having both engaged a free market economy that has started to become real players in the world markets, especially China. Cuba, a country that I thought would remain a stalwart of the revolution for, well, ever, is starting to turn, slowly but surely, to a market economy and Latin America, despite the left leaning, socialist ideas of the leaders of Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, and Chile has embraced a more moderate brand of Socialism rather than moving to a radical form of Communism that I thought would surely follow the collapse of the ruling military juntas.
So that leaves the D.P.R.K., the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, as the lone holdover to the days of Stalin, secret police, and five year plans. And here I am, just twenty-five miles away from the last workers paradise left on earth. I had to get as close as possible to it.
My friend Kelsey, who works at Dari School, also has a perverse fascination with the forbidden places that still litter the earths surface and she said that she would head up to the border with me so that I could have some company.
Amazingly enough here in South Korea, a country littered with heavily armed troops getting to the border of a nation that has been intent on invading it with its army of 1.1 million men for about fifty years, it only takes a short ride to get to what Bill Clinton called “the scariest place on earth.”
We hopped the number one bus to Dajin right outside of our building about noon and headed north. The sea was to the right, the east side, and on the west we passed miles of rice fields with the Taebak Mountains behind them. This far north the beaches stretch for miles, unbroken sand with crystal clear waters and not a soul on them. Here security is taken vary seriously. While there are a few beaches open at times for public use most of them are closed off with huge swaths of barbwire and fences with small guard posts. The threat from the north is taken so seriously that, every morning, teams of conscript soldiers are sent out to rake the sand of the beaches smooth so that footprints leading up from the waters edge will readily betray an incursion.
Something truly odd here, despite all the fear of invasion and incursion, is the constant idea that reverberates throughout the country of unification. When you ask a Korean where they are from the always say “Korea” not North Korea or South Korea, but Korea as a whole. They firmly believe, as do I, that one day soon there will be no division of the peninsula, that all Koreans will be from one country. Nowhere is this more evident than the huge new four-lane freeway under construction from Sokcho to the north. It goes all the way to the border and stops about five miles from the D.M.Z. where there are tollbooths and a visitor’s center ready and waiting to facilitate traffic up the peninsula.
When we got off the bus in Dajin we had to go up to the visitor’s center to buy tickets, a whopping two bucks for the both of us, and more importantly since there are no busses that run all the way to the border, find a ride.
Kelsey and I were totally prepared to pay forty bucks for a taxi ride up to the border but when we bought our tickets the lady at the booth asked us if we had a car to get up north and when we said we did not she asked the two Koreans behind us if they would mind taking us with them and it was no problem. These really nice people were the epitome of Korean kindness as they cleaned out the back seat of their car to make room for us, and so we set off.
After passing through a checkpoint where we had our papers checked we passed through the northernmost town in South Korea, a charming, rural place of about a thousand people, just a fishing village with a new school, some boats, and a few tractors. Nothing really that identified this as the last bastion of democracy before the proverbial line in the sand.
One thing that really struck me on the road past the village was the huge free way and tollbooths that were next to the little two lane road that we were on. Here the road was completed and just waiting for traffic to be able to move north and south just like it was in 1945 when you could board a train in Pusan and take it all the way to Paris.
When we got up to the visitors center I had the eeriest feeling of being watched. On the observation platform the sensation was almost unbearable. Here I was just a mile from the border and I knew that I had already been photographed by South Korean intelligence, D.P.R.K. border troops, the C.I.A, and who knows whom else. It was so strange to know that so many people were watching me.
Looking at the huge expanse of beach and crystal clear water that ran unbroken to the north you could just sense that everywhere around you were enough troops and munitions to plunge the world into a massive conflict that would probably include the use of nuclear, biological, and conventional weapons.
Looking at the north all you could see were mountains and trees. The only buildings were a D.P.R.K. guard post on the top of a hill and some huts at the borderline. No troops, no flags, no propaganda, nothing. All you could see were mountains, the beach, and some rocky islets just off shore. There were no boats in the vast sea, no fishing buoys that are so common off the shore in Korea, nothing, just empty hills and the sea, and then, out of the corner of my eye, a hint of the surreal. Heading up the highway to Gamesoung Mountain, the third most sacred peak in Korea, were eleven tour busses in a convoy, no doubt packed with tourists going off to see a heavily sanitized version of the last Stalinist state.
