Cycling Korea’s DMZ / Telegraph Magazine 11.24

From our mountaintop observation post we enjoy a panoramic view of a vast, empty plateau flanked and dissected by hills and ridges. Elsewhere in the world such scenery would invite exploration, but not here. This is forbidden territory. We are gazing into North Korea across the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) that has divided it from South Korea ever since the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War.

That armistice led to a ceasefire, not a peace treaty, and 71 years on it shows. Razor-wire fences snake across forested hillsides in the no-man’s land beneath us. On the far side red propaganda banners line a dirt track, and a North Korean flag flies above a military outpost. Through high-powered binoculars we can see what a South Korean soldier describes as a Potemkin village with white, three-storey concrete buildings erected to suggest that life in the north is better than it is.

And then there’s the noise. A giant bank of speakers atop a North Korean ridge blasts an eerie, piercing, undulating wail at us. The soldier says it sometimes lasts all day, and that his South Korean colleagues retaliate by blasting K-pop at their North Korean adversaries.

Three loud explosions suddenly rend the air. Animals have triggered landmines in the DMZ, the soldier explains. It happens often. There are so many mines the zone is almost impossible to walk across.

Sometimes the North Koreans fly balloons across the DMZ, he goes on. His colleagues cannot shoot them down. Most contain rubbish and excrement, but just might contain bombs. Such is life on the frontline of the Cold War’s last great flashpoint - a flashpoint back in the news following President Yoon Suk Yeol’s aborted attempt to declare martial law on Tuesday night after falsely linking South Korea’s opposition parties to North Korea.

The observation post is called Yeolsoe. I’m here with five friends to cycle the length of the DMZ, broadly following the 38th parallel from the Yellow Sea on the Korean peninsula’s western side to what Koreans call the East Sea and others call the Sea of Japan. We are doing so to explore the world’s most militarised border – a heavily mined, prodigiously fortified ribbon of land 250 kilometres long and four kilometres wide where as many as a million soldiers confront each other. President Clinton once called it ‘the scariest place on Earth’.

We are doing so, moreover, at a time of soaring tensions. President Yoon’s actions apart, in recent months North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un has renounced the long-standing goal of peaceful Korean reunification, increased his testing of nuclear weaponry, blown up cross-border road links and forged an alliance with Russia, dispatching thousands of elite troops to fight Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Riding within the DMZ, of course, is not possible, so we are actually cycling along and around the Civilian Control Zone which borders its southern edge. During our six-day journey we pass through numerous military checkpoints, and are frequently barred from taking photographs. My companions include Kathy Stephens, a former US ambassador to Seoul, Yoo Jinah, her former bodyguard, and Jun Sang Woo, her former communications officer who serves as our guide. We also have a back-up van, which is fortunate not just because the route is increasingly mountainous as we ride eastwards. We find so many fascinating places, so many people with compelling tales, that biking every last mile proves impossible in the delightfully crisp and sunny, but relatively short, days of mid-November.

Those encounters begin in Seoul, South Korea’s vibrant capital, even before we start biking. In the plush, five-storey headquarters of the grandly named Committee for the Five Northern Korean Provinces we meet five men appointed by South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol as governors-in-waiting of North Korea’s provinces – South Korea having never formally recognised North Korea. Most have never set foot in their designated fiefdoms, though they all have North Korean heritage. Each enjoys a handsome salary, car, secretariat and spacious office suite, although their posts are largely symbolic. One, Sohn Yang-young, who was born on a ship’s deck two days after his parents fled North Korea in 1950, shows us an organogram on his office wall with the names and pictures of 153 South Koreans who would help him run North Korea’s South Hamgyong province if the peninsula is ever reunified.

For these five ‘governors’ reunification is an article of faith. ‘The people in the north and those in the south share the same blood. They are one people and we believe reunification will come eventually,’ Sohn insists.

In a nondescript back-street office we meet a middle-aged North Korean who defected while working at a Russian logging camp in 1993, leaving his wife and son to the dubious mercies of Kim Jong-un (he has no idea if they are still alive).

He works incessantly – and ingeniously – to undermine Kim. For him the DMZ is no obstacle. He runs a radio station broadcasting denunciations of Kim into North Korea. He shows us plastic bottles stuffed with rice and dollar bills that he and other activists float across the Han River into North Korea when the tides are right. He produces one of the thousands of big white plastic balloons they routinely launch towards North Korea, each fitted with a timer to release a colourful parachute bearing a transistor radio, Bible and money.

He is most proud of a balloon-borne metal box that he has designed to spew out glossy propaganda leaflets over North Korea – 1,500 in total – at predetermined intervals. But even in Seoul, 35 miles south of the DMZ, this defector fears Kim’s henchmen. He requests anonymity. ‘What can I do?’ he asks. ‘God has protected me so far.’

Our journey proper begins at an observation post on Ganghwa Island where the Han River reaches the sea north-west of Seoul. Here we experience North Korea’s ‘noise bombing’ for the first time. It sounds like wailing wolves and screeching metal and has lasted for three months, causing local people serious mental distress, Park Yong-chul, Ganghwa’s mayor, tells us. ‘It makes our lives miserable,’ a villager agrees.

Through binoculars we get our first glimpse into North Korea two kilometres away across the river. It is undeniably thrilling. We can see little more than a couple of guard posts along the riverfront, some low buildings and a few tiny figures working in fields, but we are staring across the world’s last great divide between democracy and totalitarianism, capitalism and communism, freedom and serfdom, the future and the past.

At the time of Korea’s post-war division the north had the more advanced economy, but South Korea now boasts the world’s 12th largest, while North Korea’s ranks 135th. ‘The division of Korea was a human tragedy. It also turned out to be the largest real-life social science experiment ever conducted,’ Kathy Stephens observes. ‘Draw a random line across a land that has had thousands of years of ethnic, social, linguistic and cultural homogeneity and look at the result. By any measure one state is a spectacular success, the other a spectacular failure.’

Riding eastwards along a new DMZ ‘Peace Trail’, we are separated from the Han River on our left by monstrous fencing topped with coiled razor wire and punctuated by guard posts, sensors and surveillance cameras. When we photograph it, soldiers materialise from nowhere and order us to delete the pictures. To our right, incongruously, are scenes of bucolic tranquillity in the form of newly harvested paddy fields. We eat delicious baked fish in a village, then stop at a fenced-in fishermen’s enclave on the river bank where Kim Dae Sun is unloading his day’s carp catch. He has been a fisherman for 40 years, he says. It is dangerous work. He and his colleagues are chased away by North Korean coastguard vessels if they venture too far north. They occasionally spot bodies and wooden mines floating down from North Korea.

From a second observation post called Aegibong, on a hilltop overlooking the confluence of the Han and Imjin rivers, we gain another tantalising glimpse into that mysterious hermit kingdom north of the DMZ – this time from closer range.

We can see another Potemkin village – a cluster of white concrete buildings three or four storeys high. We spot a man using an ox-drawn plough, villagers piling hay into a lone tractor’s trailer, and a dozen soldiers using humble spades to strengthen riverfront defences.

Glancing eastwards from that pre-industrial landscape I can see, in the distance, the forest of gleaming white tower blocks that is Paju, a satellite city of Seoul where we will spend the night. Until the 1990s South Korea, fearing a North Korean land invasion, banned any urban development between Seoul and the border. Paju is the result of that ban’s relaxation: an impressive city of 500,000 people that scarcely existed 30 years ago.

South Korea’s military supremacy is such that ‘Koreans are not worried about war or living so close to the DMZ,’ Kang Seong-il, our youthful hotel receptionist, says. ‘War’s impossible because the gap between the two militaries is so huge,’ Jang Sang-heo, a retired army officer, agrees. They omit to mention North Korea’s nuclear weaponry.

Indeed South Koreans are so sanguine nowadays that parts of the DMZ near Seoul have become major tourist attractions. On our second morning we join throngs of visitors to Imjingak, a DMZ theme park featuring another observation post reached by cable car, a shrapnel-shredded steam locomotive destroyed in the Korean war, and the wooden ‘Freedom Bridge’ across which thousands of prisoners returned at the war’s end.

There is even a small funfair, which seems bizarre, but Kathy reckons that South Korea’s government wants to show its people the stark reality of the DMZ to bolster diminishing public support for huge military budgets, national service and reunification. ‘The tourists see the security threat that South Korea still faces, and the tragedy of the division, in a very visceral way,’ she explains. They are certainly moved. Here, as at other observation posts, they tie sorrowful messages to fences: ‘Mother, I still remember you’; ‘Granny and Grandad, I miss you’; ‘Down with Kim Jong-un’.

That afternoon we visit a remarkable cemetery beyond Paju. Covering 187 acres of manicured hillside with sublime views of North Korea’s mountains, the Donghwa Gyongmo Memorial Park is the resting place of some 50,000 displaced North Koreans who asked to be buried as close as possible to their homeland.

In 1950, Rah Ki-seop, then aged 17, boarded a boat in the North Korean port of Cheongjin to escape advancing Chinese forces. He could never return, and his father and brother were executed. He served in the South Korean army, then became a teacher. Now 92, Rah shows us the site where he wants his ashes buried alongside other North Koreans from his region. He adds that when Korea is reunified he – like thousands of others buried in this cemetery – wants his urn disinterred and returned to his birthplace.

We head north-east along the Imjin River – its banks, bridges and tributaries still protected from North Korean infiltrators by razor-wire fences and underwater barriers designed to thwart mini-subs. We pass a ruined crematorium for UN troops killed in the Korean War. There are numerous ‘tank traps’ – high walls topped by huge concrete blocks for toppling on to the narrow roads below – and a memorial park where in 1951 a tiny battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment held off Chinese hordes for three vital days while Seoul was reinforced, earning themselves the accolade the ‘Glorious Glosters’.

We climb up to the Yeolsoe observation post past old Korean War minefields ringed with warning signs, then hear the explosions from today’s minefields. Another peculiarity of the uninhabited DMZ is that it has become a pristine – if perilous – wildlife sanctuary for any number of threatened species including the Asiatic black bear, long-tailed goral goat and red-crowned crane. Later we buy jars of ‘DMZ honey’ from a villager whose bees can – uniquely – cross the DMZ with impunity.

On our fourth day we make another memorable stop. High on a mountainside inside the Civilian Control Zone we don helmets and descend into one of four ‘infiltration tunnels’ dug secretly by North Korea in the 1970s to invade the south.

This one was discovered in 1975 after two sentries heard underground explosions. It was an extraordinary feat of engineering by some of the world’s best tunnellers (North Korea has buried most of its nuclear facilities underground, and helped Hamas build numerous tunnels into Egypt from the Gaza Strip). The tunnel stretches 3.5 kilometres beneath the mountain, and is wide enough to allow 16,000 soldiers an hour to enter South Korea before sweeping down the plain that leads to Seoul.

The tunnel is low, wet, dimly lit, but we’re allowed to walk along it, right beneath the DMZ and to within 300 metres of the Military Demarcation Line that marks the precise boundary between North and South Korea. There it is blocked by a steel grill and an old tunnelling train. A sign proclaims: ‘For the sake of the suffering people of the north… we should never let our guard down and defend our peace until we achieve reunification.’

Despite these grim reminders of war, our ride is a delight. We occasionally pass cordoned-off minefields, or a riverside banner warning that mines may have floated down from the DMZ during periods of flooding. But the late autumn weather is sublime, the skies cloudless. The people are courteous and welcoming. Every meal is a gastronomic adventure. Our hotels – and a Buddhist temple where we stay one night – are spotless.

We ride along narrow tracks between paddy fields, or on smooth but empty highways, as cranes and skeins of geese – more denizens of the DMZ – fly overhead. Smallholders grow ginseng, sesame, outsized cabbages, giant radishes and bright red chillies. We admire leafless persimmon trees laden with bright orange fruit and see old women bent double by lifetimes of labouring in the fields – a reminder of just how far South Korea has progressed in two generations.

On the fifth day we slog up into the mountains to a huge ‘Peace Dam’ across a steep valley containing a Han River tributary north-east of Hwacheon. This is no ordinary dam. It was built not to store water or generate hydro-electricity, but as a defensive measure. It was built to prevent North Korea flooding the surrounding area, and possibly Seoul itself, by accidentally or deliberately releasing the 2.6 billion tons of water stored in its own structurally suspect Imnam Dam further upstream.

‘I’m afraid it may collapse because of defects,’ says Jeong Ki-hwa, a guide. Sixteen times North Korea had released water from the Imnam Dam during recent rainy seasons, she adds. Only twice had it warned the south in advance.

A vast bell forged from cartridge cases gleaned from the world’s conflict zones overlooks the Peace Dam. Jeong invites us to ring it. A great booming chime fills the valley.

A thrilling, 10 kilometre run down a deserted switchback road takes us into the Punchbowl, a spectacular basin encircled by mountains. There a war memorial flanked by old tanks and artillery pieces commemorates no fewer than nine battles fought here during the ‘Forgotten War’, which cost three million lives, 1,100 of them British.

That night, in Wontong, we meet another defector, a 67-year-old lady of great dignity named Lee Jeongsun. She tells us she worked illegally to reunite families split between north and south until forced to flee across the Yalu River into China in 2009. In a harrowing Korean version of Sophie’s Choice, she managed to bring her younger daughter with her, but had to leave behind her son and older daughter (her husband died during the great famine of the 1990s).

Lee’s defection destroyed her son’s future. She subsequently arranged for her older daughter to defect with the help of Chinese agents, but she was caught and dispatched to a labour camp for six months. Lee still sends her children money through Chinese intermediaries, but can no longer talk to them on illicit mobile phones because of a crackdown. ‘It’s a tragedy for me,’ she says, but she had to leave: ‘In North Korea my life was not mine.’

The next day we freewheel down to the coastal town of Goseong, then cycle north past fortified beaches to a final observation post where South Koreans have erected a Christian cross and a giant Buddha so they are clearly visible to the wretched inhabitants of that benighted land beyond the DMZ. The post offers a glorious view northwards to a shimmering sea, sandy beaches and forested mountains. But the sea has no boats, the beaches are deserted and razor-wire fences dissect the ridges. There is no human habitation, just an unused railway line and a sleek but abandoned four-lane highway heading north. The highway was built to take South Koreans to a hiking and golf resort in North Korea’s Diamond Mountains that was opened during a thaw in relations in the early 2000s. That arrangement was suspended in 2008 after a South Korean visitor strayed on to an off-limits beach and was shot. In 2022 Kim Jong-un began destroying the resort, dashing hopes of further rapprochement.

In a literal sense this place marks the end of our road too. We have learned much about the DMZ. It is both monstrous and beautiful, a minefield and a wildlife refuge. It is the world’s most dangerous border where minor incidents can rapidly spiral out of control, but has largely preserved the peace for seven decades. It has also evolved from a buffer between two armies into something different. Should North Korea declare war today, it would not invade across the DMZ: it would use cyber warfare or even nuclear weapons. To infiltrate South Korea it does not smuggle agents across the DMZ but sends them via China. In a very real sense the DMZ has itself become a relic like the many tanks traps, minefields and war memorials we have passed.

Back in Seoul, I have breakfast with Tae Yong-ho, who defected when he was deputy head of North Korea’s London embassy in 2016, now advises President Yoon on reunification, and is followed everywhere by several bodyguards. He explains how memory sticks loaded with K-pop and South Korean movies are flooding into North Korea from China – inciting the young, undermining the regime’s propaganda and eroding support for Kim Jong-un. No mines and razor-wire fencing can stop that digital revolution, he argues: ‘There’s no way for Kim Jong-un to win this cultural war.’ His pernicious regime would be toppled, and the peninsula reunited, ‘within 20 years’.