Reminded by the NK propaganda. Day after Halloween after pulling an all nighter drinking I went to the
DMZ with a couple buddies with a tour group. All in all it sucked pretty bad, the "tour guide" basically just dropped us off in a bus and let us wander around, but at least I can say I did it. Most of it was pretty chintzy/touristy, but there were one or two cool parts.
Freedom Bridge: Where they exchanged prisoners and shit after the Korean War
A gunned the fuck out of Locomotive.
Example of the reunification talk in that other thread.
Awesome pic we took at this bell. I think it was called the Peace Bell. These were all taken at
Imjingak, which has basically turned into a tourist center.
North Korea has burrowed a
series of tunnels underneath the NK/SK border all the way to Seoul, thus far they have only found 4 of them. I got to go in one, but I guess here was a visual of what it would look like if they would have actually invaded Seoul?
"Estimates based on the tunnel's size, suggest it would have allowed approximately 2,000 KPA soldiers (one regiment) to pass through it per hour."
We weren't supposed to have cameras past this point, but it was pretty loosely enforced. I just took this, pretended to put it back in a locker, and put it in my pocket.
This is the "tourist created tunnel" as I have named it to get down to the actual tunnel dug by North Korea. At first I thought this was it and was severely disappointed.
This is part of the actual tunnel, and it was VERY short. Maybe 5 feet tall? Which is why we had to wear those yellow hats. The North Koreans had scrubbed coal on the walls to try and pass it as a "coal mine" if it were discovered. It didn't work.
There are still tons of mines from the Korean War as well as freshly placed one everywhere around the DMZ. Needless to say, w weren't allowed to wander much.
This is where you can view the actual DMZ and North Korea. Several interesting points to this picture: Most of whitey you see here were on my tour group, or another ones. Clearly the whole experience has been kind of commercialized as fuck, which kinda took away from it a bit, but whatever. Also that yellow line you see on the ground is some pretty dumb arbitary line we couldn't cross with a camera. We could go to the wall and look over, but not take pictures. This is a dumb point for several reasons, mainly being tall (the tallest one in the middle left is our buddy Tim) and having arms/zoom functions on almost every camera on the market these days, but whatever. There were Korean soldiers all around who would take your camera and make you delete pictures if they caught you taking any past the yellow line.
A lot of us did it anyway.
Good call, SK. That'll scare 'em. Dunno what the first part means, but the last part says "han-chingu" which means something like "korean friend" so it probably says something like "the korean army is your friend"
The last stop was a place called
Dorasan Station, which I guess was transporting goods to and from NK (Pyeongyang is the capital of NK and where Kim Jong Il resides), but got shut down when things went south a couple years ago.
Overall, pretty cool. Earlier this month NK announced it was willing to let Americans into North Korea again, so i've been keeping in touch with a tour group to try and get in on that.