The DMZ: as close to North Korea as you can get

Of all the day trips out of Seoul, the one I wanted was the DMZ, the strip of
no-man's-land that has divided the peninsula since the war, and the closest an
ordinary traveller can get to looking into North Korea. The tours on offer
were all much the same, so I stopped comparing, booked one, and went.

It begins at Imjingak, on the edge of the civilian control line, and it is a
strange, heavy place: the Bridge of Freedom, built to bring prisoners of war
home at the end of the fighting; a wall covered in ribbons and handwritten
wishes for reunification; a rusted steam locomotive riddled with bullet holes,
the last train out, its rails cut where the line north simply stops. My
father-in-law collects banknotes, so I went hunting for North Korean currency
in the shops there and found some. He will be thrilled.

Then the Third Infiltration Tunnel, one of several the North secretly dug
under the border to move troops south. You walk down into the rock and along
it, low and narrow, and no, no photographs. It is just a tunnel, and
it is not just a tunnel.

After a stop at a farming village inside the controlled zone came the part
everyone comes for: a hilltop with a clear view across the river into North
Korea. Their land, their village, their flag on an enormous pole, and on the
southern side another flag on another pole, the two countries locked for years
in a competition to build the taller one. Of all the things to compete over.
But there it was, in front of me, across the water.

We finished on the peace gondola over the Imjin River to Camp Greaves, a
former American base that is a gallery now. The whole day has a tense,
restricted air you find nowhere else, and yet by mid-afternoon I was back
among the crowds in central Seoul. It is not a fun day out. It is one you do
not forget.