The DMZ, the most watched border on earth, a day trip from Seoul

The Korean War began in June 1950, when North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel into the South. It swept up and down the peninsula for three years, drawing in the United States and United Nations forces on one side and China on the other, and killing well over a million people. In July 1953 an armistice stopped the fighting roughly where the front line then lay. It was meant to be temporary, pending a peace settlement. No peace treaty has ever been signed. Technically, the war has never ended.

The line where the guns stopped became the Military Demarcation Line, and on either side of it each army pulled back two kilometres. That created the Demilitarized Zone, a strip about four kilometres wide running some two hundred and fifty kilometres across the peninsula from coast to coast. The name is famously misleading. The zone itself has few soldiers in it, but it is lined on both sides by some of the heaviest concentrations of troops, fences, minefields and guard posts on earth.

What a visit sees

The southern edge of the DMZ is about an hour's drive north of central Seoul, and the South Korean government allows organised visits to several sites along it. A typical tour includes some or all of the following.

At Imjingak, a park on the edge of the restricted area, there are memorials to the war, the Freedom Bridge over which prisoners of war were exchanged in 1953, and fences hung with ribbons and messages from families separated by the border. It is a place of real grief, which most Korean visitors treat with great seriousness.

The Third Tunnel of Aggression, found in 1978, is one of several tunnels dug under the zone from the North. Visitors can walk down a sloping shaft and along part of it, stooping under the low rock ceiling, to a point near the demarcation line.

From the Dora Observatory, on a hill overlooking the zone, you can look across into North Korea. On a clear day you can see fields, villages, a propaganda village with an enormous flagpole and, in the distance, the city of Kaesong. Dorasan station nearby is a modern railway station built for trains to the North that do not run.

The most famous site, the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom, is where the two sides' soldiers face each other across a line of blue negotiating huts. Access to it has been suspended at various times in recent years, so it should never be assumed to be part of a visit.

The division still touches daily life in the South. Almost all South Korean men do compulsory military service, typically for around a year and a half, and many of the soldiers you see at the DMZ sites are conscripts in their early twenties. Millions of families were separated by the war, and the short, organised reunions arranged between North and South over the years have been some of the most painful scenes in the peninsula's recent history.

The practical side

A DMZ visit is controlled by the military, and the rules are strict. Passports are needed. Photography is restricted at some points. Dress codes have applied at some sites, and tours can be cancelled or changed at short notice for military, political or even animal-health reasons. It is worth treating any particular itinerary as provisional.

There is also an unexpected side to the zone. Seventy years with very little human activity have let nature take back much of the land inside it. The DMZ and its edges are now an important refuge for wildlife, including rare red-crowned cranes that winter there.

Seeing it as part of a tour

G Adventures' Best of South Korea, seven nights in October and November, includes the Demilitarized Zone among its places. It sits within a route that runs from Seoul to Gyeongju, the folk village of Yangdong and Busan.

Explore Worldwide's Discover South Korea, eleven nights, doesn't list the DMZ among its places, but it starts in Seoul. Arranging a DMZ visit before or after the tour, with a licensed operator, is straightforward. The rest of the route takes in Andong and Hahoe, Gyeongju, Busan, Gwangju and Jeonju.

Few day trips anywhere leave such a lasting impression. It is not a pleasant outing in the usual sense, but it changes how you see everything else in South Korea: the speed, the prosperity and the determination of a country that grew up within sight of that line.