Going Seoul-searching

SEOUL — Many Americans spend time in Seoul with the U.S. military or on business. Only now is Seoul beginning to realize its potential as a draw for tourists as well.

For those making their first trip to Asia — this is the place to begin exploring the other side of the world.

The city is clean and free of street crime; people have little need to worry about terrorists blowing up buildings full of people; and there is no SARS. In one week, a writer and a photographer saw no face masks worn anywhere in the city, and that includes crowded markets, restaurants and entertainment districts that teem with people day and night.

Seoul, like the rest of Northeast Asia, is off the beaten path for the militant Islamists. Of course, the ever-hostile North Korea lies just 30 miles to the north of Seoul, the sprawling capital of 20-plus million residents and commuters that offers living proof that South Korea won the Cold War.

To appreciate how lopsided that victory was, the first-time visitor must join the 150,000 or so tourists who visit the demilitarized zone each year. Tours in English are readily available to several sites, including a peace park, mountain overlook and North Korean infiltration tunnels big enough for a two-lane highway. A visit to the truce village at Panmunjom tops them all.

It isn’t much of a village, just a bunch of simple one-story huts, scrubbed and freshly painted in the shade of baby blue that matches that of the U.N. flag. They sit in a tiny valley surrounded by guard towers and observation posts manned on the other side by real North Korean soldiers. In crisp, pressed olive uniforms, with pictures of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il on the lapel, they stare at visitors with furrowed brows, snarled lips and scowling eyes.

When the guide takes visitors into one of the huts, sometimes a North Korean soldier will stroll up to the window and glare inside. Try taking a picture of the North Korean, but be quick. As soon as he sees a camera pointed in his direction, he runs away.

The tours are well-organized. Tennis shoes, bluejeans, shorts and other casual wear are forbidden, lest they provide images for North Korea’s propaganda machine to illustrate America’s decadence. The tours come with a briefing from an American soldier, and there are plenty of opportunities to peer at North Korean guard posts atop rolling hills outside.

There’s a fake North Korean village, dubbed “propaganda village” by U.S. and South Korean troops. No one lives there, but sometimes the North Koreans bring in a busload of people to hang up some laundry and otherwise hang out to fool the VIPs they bring down from Pyongyang.

A loudspeaker above the village blasts insults at the South, or classic communist propaganda. “Our great leader Kim Jong-il has done so much for us,” it blared during a recent morning visit as pairs of white Manchurian cranes frolicked overhead. The species is said to be extinct everywhere except along the 150-mile-long, 2.5-mile-wide demilitarized zone that divides the peninsula. No one walks through the DMZ except wildlife, except at Panmunjom — until recently the only land crossing between North and South Korea along the entire length of the DMZ.

Here, huge letters decorate mountain slopes facing south. “Our victory is for our sunshine general, Kim Jong-il, hurray,” says one mountain. Each boasts a giant flag on a skyscraper-size flagpole. North and South used to compete, building bigger and bigger poles and flags until, presumably, the South decided things had gotten out of hand.

The North won that battle and today displays the biggest flag on the tallest pole. The problem is that the flag weighs more than 600 pounds, meaning it just hangs like a wet dishrag unless a typhoon happens to blow through.

On the other side, the South Korean flag unfurls in the gentle morning breeze.

Panmunjom has a history of ax murders, defections and shootouts, but the last serious incident was 20 years ago when a defection by a Soviet officer, who stepped across the line, triggered a firefight. One can leave for Panmunjom early in the morning on a tour bus from Seoul and be back with plenty of time to spare in the afternoon.

Story Continues →