The DMZ Tour
If you spend a few days in Korea, I highly recommend taking a DMZ tour. You can find these experiences by searching "DMZ Tour" on Google—there are many variants available, most costing between $35-60, though all trips must be done through government-approved tour groups.
Starting at 7am at Hongik University, I was led to one of the many buses lining up in the early morning. Our tour guide (her name was Moon) was bubbly and energetic, giving us a refresher on Korean history from the late Joseon dynasty up to today. She explained the Soviet and US plans to divide Korea at the 38th parallel and the ensuing war. She shared personal anecdotes about the tensions between North and South Korea. Once, she told us, she was asked to leave a North Korean restaurant near the Chinese border when they discovered her South Korean identity.
Only one hour into the enjoyable refresher on Korean history, I checked my phone GPS, and we were no more than 10 km from the border. I looked outside at an overcast sky and felt an impending sense of doom. A gloomy, eerie aura lingered as Seoul's tall concrete and glass buildings gave way to countryside houses, and then to nothing but barbed wire fences and South Korean army vehicles.
At one point, we pulled up to a blockaded road. Had we continued straight, we would have reached Kaesong (the city from Crash Landing On You) just kilometers away on the North Korean side. Due to ongoing hostilities, this road remained closed.
From the Dora Observatory, I could see the entirety of the forested DMZ. Pictures were forbidden, but my tour guide was generous enough to send me photos of the area and Panmunjom (the Joint Security Area). To absolve myself of all legal and ethical liability, I cannot post any of them here. So that is just another reason for you to see and experience this ongoing conflict in person 🙂
Next, I entered the Third Tunnel of Aggression, an actual tunnel that the North Koreans dug for, as the name implies, a potential act of aggression. There's a fourth tunnel, and given the secrecy and hostility on both sides, who's to say there aren't more? Crazy stuff.
Phones were completely forbidden here, so I left mine in the lockers at the visitor center. The tour guides gave us helmets to navigate the tunnels. I put mine on and walked a few hundred meters into the cold, soggy earth. The ground flattened out as I entered the tunnel proper. At 180cm tall, I had to hunch over the whole time, hitting my helmeted head on the rocky ceiling multiple times. At the tunnel's end, you stand within a few meters of the formal border line between North and South Korea. It's a great experience, but not for the claustrophobic.
The whole guided tour only took about 2 hours for the Dora Observatory and the Third Tunnel of Aggression, and very soon we were on our way back to Seoul.
As Moon thanked us for joining the tour, she played a video on the bus television:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt052H_kVuo
It was a bone-chilling experience. The video is incredibly touching. Watching brother-sister and mother-son pairs see each other for the first time in decades, I couldn't help but feel a knot in my throat. Our setting made it all the more grave: barbed wire fences rolled past us as Korean army trucks roared nearby. Only days before, I had read about this story twice on the same day—first at the National Museum of Korea, then at the War Memorial of Korea. Now I was experiencing it a third time, in the rawest way possible.
So once again, I highly recommend this experience. You get to see North Korea up close, you stand in the very locations where the war took place, and position yourself no more than two kilometers from the Joint Security Area, where the conflict that started on June 25, 1950 continues today. It’s as real as it gets.