sokcho fire water

Some pictures from the Sokcho Fire Water Festival

1. Sokcho Man and his lady friend, Sokcho's mascots

2. Some crazed dance that the Koreans found strangly stimulating, we found it hilarous

3-5. Some sort of strange procession

panmunjon

Well I finally was able to cross off number 32 on my list of life goals, a visit to the Joint Security Area at Panmujon, the truce village where the treaty to halt the hostilities of the Korean war was signed.

The trip up was pretty cool, going farther and farther north of Seoul on the Reunification highway that got progressivly emptier the farther we strayed from the megopolis of Seoul.

As we wound are way through rice fields and low mountians the road become more and more chocked by anti-tank barriers and barbed wire and we finally reached the first of several checkpoints where our id's were checked for the first, but not the last time.

After passing through the checkpoint and taking a few illegal pictures we finally reached Camp Boniface where we got to go through our security briefing and get our UN badges. We were warned to make no sudden moves, to not gesture to the friendly faces across the border, especially the ones in the brown uniforms, and if we saw Sergant Reardon running, to follow as fast as we could.

From Camp Boniface we headed up to the JSA where we actually got to cross over the North Korean border and see the friendly Nork gaurds.

The rest of the trip, after the tension and the guns of the JSA was pretty boring, a lookout were I had to erase alot of pictures for trying to break the law, and a tunnel that we couldnt photograph at all.

Pictures-

1. Our security briefing and badge

2. Four feet across the border, behind the door stands some charming, heavily armed Norks.

3. The Nork building, with two gaurds.

4. The bridge of no return, the rusted sign to the left is a border sign

5. The worlds tallest flagpole, flying the DPRK flag. The flag is as big as a four story building.